![]() That evening’s news also couldn’t foretell how the U.S. What the initial reports did not immediately presage, however, was that the execution would be a watershed for both Iran’s economy and the future of the nation’s Jewish community. In no other country in the world is this a capital offense.”Īmnesty International later found numerous violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including arbitrary arrest and detention, punishment for a crime that did not constitute a criminal offense at the time it was committed, denial of freedom of religion, and of the right to defense through an attorney and the right to appeal. ![]() “In other words, he was murdered for being a Jew friendly to Zionism. “What this seems to come down to was that he had met some Israeli figures in the early 1960s and had contributed to Israeli causes,” the newspaper wrote. Among the eight men who faced an Islamic firing squad today was a leading Jewish businessman, the first member of that troubled community to be convicted of associating, in the words of the court, ‘with Israel and Zionism.’ Jews in Iran fear that accusation from militant Muslims more than any other.”Ī Washington Post editorial the next week noted how outrageous the accusation of “spying for Israel and raising funds for Israel to bomb Palestinians” was. But today’s give rise to increased concern for Iran’s minority groups. “Elsewhere overseas today, there were more executions in Iran,” he intoned. On ABC’s “World News Tonight,” anchor Peter Jennings, with a map of Iran chromakeyed over his left shoulder showing the capital Tehran and a silhouette of a rifle across the yellow outline of the nation, announced the news. The family began mourning my grandfather even as it marked my grandmother’s yartzeit.īy that evening, reports of my grandfather’s execution had spread around the globe. Shortly after her two boys had gone off to grade school, her cousins arrived at her Upper East Side place, their faces telegraphing the sorrow they were about to utter. My father’s sister, my aunt Mahnaz, who was in New York, was spared the late-night phone call. My mother fed me breakfast, then took me down to the lobby outside of which a small yellow school bus waited outside to take me to the Lycée Français, where I was finishing first grade. I had no idea something cataclysmic had occurred. The morning of May 9, I woke to a house full of disheveled and tired people - folks I was used to seeing in our apartment at lunch or dinner. Others who lived in our building threw on robes and took the elevator to our apartment. "Titan of Tehran: From Jewish Ghetto to Corporate Colossus to Firing Squad - My Grandfather's Life." AP BooksĪs word of my grandfather’s execution spread in the middle of the night, friends and family from Long Island and Queens hurried to our place. His pregnant wife, Sheryl, heard the news and shook him awake. ![]() On Long Island, my father’s youngest brother, Sina, had nodded off with his shortwave radio murmuring on. By the first week of May, revolutionary firing squads had executed some 200 people, almost all of them members of the deposed shah’s government, military and secret service. Now a theocratic ruler had taken over from the monarch and imprisoned my grandfather again. Two years before that, in 1975, it was the shah’s secret service - not Khomeini’s revolutionaries - that had taken my grandfather from his house in the middle of the night and held him for months before releasing him. We had moved to New York almost two years earlier, in the summer of 1977, after my father decided he didn’t want to raise us in Iran. My father never missed the broadcast in the morning, New York time, for Tehran’s evening news, or the one at night for early morning developments.Some weekend mornings, I’d sit on the floor outside the bathroom and watch him shave while he listened to Radio Iran before heading out for breakfast with my mother, Helen, and my younger brother, Shahram, at the Greek diner across the street on 58th Street and First Avenue. That spring, when I was turning 7, Farsi-language news blared from the radio every day. He settled on a corner of the bathroom sink near a narrow window facing east, where the sounds were clearest from 6,000 miles away. My father unpacked the big black box and tested the radio’s reception around our 31st floor apartment. ![]()
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