Iran Jews Plead With Barack Obama To Grab Chance for Detente
Image by getty images
The leader of Tehran’s Jewish community has urged U.S. President Barack Obama to take advantage of the “unrepeatable” opportunity to repair relations with Iran, AFP reported on Monday.
“If the U.S. and the international community do not make the best of this golden and perhaps unrepeatable opportunity, then it will be in the benefit of those who are against the normalization of ties between Iran and the U.S.,” wrote Homayoun Sameyah, according to AFP, in an open letter addressed to Obama.
In the letter Sameyah also described in a positive light the condition of the Jewish community in Iran, AFP reported. “We, the Iranian Jews, as an Iranian religious minority, participated in the elections and elected our popular president freely.”
The Jewish community, he reportedly said in a rebuttal of Netanyahu’s remarks to the Iranian public, is free to “[wear] jeans and [listen] to music.”
In September, the Iranian Jewish community in the United States declined an official invitation to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rohani during his visit to New York.
For more go to Haaretz
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
