Things I never knew until now !
Saudi Arabia, until recently, banned all non-Islamic religious practices in public, including Judaism.
There are no synagogues in the country.
Entry was historically difficult for Jewish individuals or those with Israeli passports.
According to estimates, between 17,000 and 25,000 Iranian Jews are living mostly in larger cities such as Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Hamedan and Tabriz.
Next to Israel, Iran has the largest number of people of the Jewish faith in the Middle East. Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, has one reserved seat for the Jewish community.
In Isfahan, one of the city’s most prominent synagogues is located next to a mosque called Al Aqsa, and in Tehran, there are at least 50 synagogues spread across the city.
The Jewish community also runs a hospital in Tehran that caters to all patients regardless of their religious affiliation.
Jewish ties to the country date back as far as 2,700 years ago, Younes Hamami Lalehzar, a senior rabbi at Abrishami Synagogue in Tehran, once told me in an interview.
It is believed that Jewish heroine Esther and her uncle, Mordechai, are buried in the western city of Hamedan. According to Jewish biblical text, Esther was married to the Persian king, Xerxes.
In more recent history, the country gave safe haven to Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition. During German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s rampage of Europe, Polish Jews sought refuge in Iran.
But there have also been periods of unrest, such as the forced conversion of Jews to Islam during the Safavid and Qajar era, and the migration of thousands of Iranian Jews to the US and Israel following the 1979 Islamic revolution.