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6 MARCH 2015                                                 
For One Outspoken Teenager in Revolution-Era Iran, Queen Esther Was a Kindred Spirit” 
By Sima Goel, Tablet

Sima Goel grew up in Iran, “a strong-willed, intelligent girl in a world where silence and obedience were required of women.” Urged by her mother to flee the country at the age of seventeen, Sima survived a journey that took her from Iran to Pakistan and then to Canada by identifying with another strong-willed, intelligent girl who grew up in Persia, the Biblical Esther.


 

Dome Inside the Purported Shrine of Esther and Mordechai, Hamadan, Iran (Photo courtesy of Yassi Gabbay/Diarna Geo-Museum) 
 
Special 18th NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival Feature: Before the Revolution
 

Click here to watch the trailer for Before the Revolution
 
The “Iranian Intrigue” Program (17 March will feature two films about unexpected communities tied to Iran: the large number of Israeli’s living in Iran before the 1979 Revolution (Before the Revolution) and the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living who came to the U.S. in its wake (The Iranian Americans). 
 
Drawing on rare archival footage, personal histories, and interviews, this is the untold story of the Israeli Paradise in Iran: During the 60’s and 70’s, thousands of Israelis lived in Tehran, enjoying special status under the Shah’s dictatorial rule. Protected by large arms deals and complex financial ties, this community relished in luxury, until the Revolution turned their lives, and the country, upside down.

The complete list of selected films with dates, times, ticket, donor & sponsorship information can be found here
Special Purim Feature: Diarna Insights: Inside Queen Esther’s Tomb
 

The ornate gate that formerly adorned the Shrine to Esther and Mordechai (Photo courtesy of Yassi Gabbay/Diarna Geo-Museum)
 
Just off Imam Khomieni square in Hamadan is a pilgrimage site venerated by many Iranians as the burial shrine of biblical luminaries Esther and Mordechai. These heroes of the holiday of Purim—who according to tradition saved the Jews of the Persian Empire from genocide—are memorialized in a remarkable site that was remarkably renovated in the 1970s. Watch an interview with the site’s architect (Yassi Gabbay), walk inside a 3-D model, and see post-renovation photos smuggled out of Iran and only recently developed, as well as newly-discovered 100-year-old photos of the site. Little known outside of Iran, secrecy, indeed a double secret, shrouds the shrine.

Jewish Cemetery, Tiaret, Algeria (Photo courtesy of Diarna Geo-Museum)
 
Home, for Algeria’s Jews, is elsewhere”  
By Farah Souames, Open Democracy

Are there any Jews living in Algeria? No one in Algeria seems to know, or to want to talk about it. What is for sure, however, is that ”when the last Jewish emigrant from Algeria has died, the notion of visiting the ‘Algerian homeland’ will likely die with them.”
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