Anyone with Persian cousins, as I have, had heard this story in its many sad, sometimes miraculous variations
Moussa Chacham-Tzedek was a wealthy Persian businessman whose nephew, a rav I know, connected us. As we sat in his Jerusalem mansion, Amu (“Uncle”) Moussa revealed to me that he’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness — but that wasn’t why he summoned me. He was about to reveal a part of his life that had haunted him until now. PART II
Amu Moussa recounted how he’d grown up in a wealthy family of merchants in a Jewish suburb of Tehran.
The Shah had championed sweeping national modernization and his family’s import-export business profited immensely from the Shah’s policies. The family had summer homes, winter homes, servants, and not the slightest concern that things would change for the worse in the not-too-distant future.
“My father’s brother, Amu Mansour, told the family he was leaving the business to move to Israel. ‘Why should you be such a Zionist?’ my father chided him. The family thought Amu Mansour was crazy to leave, but he didn’t believe the paradise we were living in would endure. Amu Mansour warned us that the Jews in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had been forced to leave with nothing but the shirts on their backs. He said we should leave while we could. But my father told him, ‘Persians are different, they aren’t Arabs, we are safe here and we are prospering in ways no other generation could have imagined.’ My father was right for another decade — but then it became clear that Amu Mansour wasn’t an alarmist, he was just smarter than the rest of our community.”
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