(L-R) David, Mehjad and Menashe each fled Iran more than 30 years ago. Photo by Louis Keene
By Louis Keene
June 17, 2025
LOS ANGELES – Thousands of miles away and decades removed from his country of birth, the man in the yellow tracksuit frowned over his cards. “Bi’ah,” David said in his native Farsi, discarding one. The word usually translates to “come,” but he was talking to his opponent: Go.
David, who is 79 and declined to share his last name, plays Rummy and backgammon most afternoons with other Iranian Jewish retirees in this air-conditioned community center on L.A.’s Westside. They take its safety and comfort for granted as war rages in the country they fled.
The last few days had been exhilarating for David. On Thursday, Israel launched an attack against Tehran — his hometown — killing several leaders of the country’s military and its nuclear program in a matter of hours. Over the weekend, his old apartment building in Bat Yam, a Tel Aviv suburb, was destroyed by retaliatory Iranian missile fire.
He was bullish on the war in spite of the losses. “Israel is going to get them,” David said, pounding his fist in the air. He predicted the entire campaign would take two weeks. “Baruch Hashem,” he said.
The man across from him, Menashe, picked up a card from the discard pile. “Every other country in the Middle East wanted this to happen,” Menashe, 75, said.
They are among the legions of Jews who fled Iran in the 1980s and 1990s after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Many of them eventually settled in Los Angeles, where anywhere between 22,500 to 50,000 Jews help constitute what today is the largest Iranian community outside Iran. And though both Menashe and David still have family in Iran, they were not ambivalent about the bombing.
“I talked to someone there today,” said Menashe, referring to Iran. “They are happy.”
Their optimism reflected what appears to be a consensus supporting the war among former Iranian refugees. Many see Israel’s attack — characterized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a preemptive assault — as a necessary step to curtail Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. And perhaps regime change — and a path toward liberalism — was in the cards, too.
Sam Yebri, an Iranian-Jewish attorney based in Los Angeles, said Monday that while Iranian Americans were pained by the suffering of innocent people in the war, they remained hopeful that the war would bring peace.
“We are in a potentially historic ‘fall of Berlin Wall’ type of moment,” he wrote in an Instagram post.
The nonprofit Yebri founded to celebrate Iranian-Jewish culture, called 30 Years After, honors a generation that gave up everything they had in Iran to pursue freedom elsewhere.
Before David emigrated from Iran in the mid-1980s, he had owned a thriving women’s clothing wholesaler, importing precious fabrics from Italy and Morocco. He left behind a $20 million fortune when he fled, he told me; it was easier to immigrate to Israel than the United States, and he started over in Bat Yam.
Six years later, he moved again to the U.S., where he built a new fashion empire, and a family: four kids, five grandchildren, he cheerfully reported.
Israel’s willingness to take in those fleeing the Ayatollah informs their descendants’ gratitude today, according to Rachel Sumekh, an Iranian American Jewish nonprofit leader. Moreover, Sumekh said, Jewish people had been persecuted in Iran even before the Ayatollah took over. In spite of their indigeneity to the country — Jewish people have lived in Iran for thousands of years — they had always been cultural outsiders, she said.
Sumekh, whose mother fled to Israel in the mid-1980s, was under no illusion about the threat posed by Iran.
“Iran fully intends to continue to use Israel as a scapegoat and as a punching bag,” she said. “Will they ever use nuclear weapons? I don’t know, but they’re really committed to creating them.”
Still, she was more skeptical of the war than some of her fellow Iranian Americans. She noted that there are still an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Jewish people living in Iran today — compared to 250,000 before the Revolution — and said they were the most vulnerable in the current moment.
“If this war is to save Jews, what about the Jews in Iran?” she said.
“I want both places,” Sumekh added, referring to Iran and Israel, “to be places that I can visit with a sense of peace and safety, and I want everyone who lives in those places to feel peace and safety. I just believe that peace and diplomacy is the way we get there. I don’t trust bombs.”
