Jewish in Iran “are honestly furious at their leadership for ignoring Arvin’s case while he was rotting in jail for two years,” the Persian-language journalist who was among those to break the story told JNS.

By Karmel Mqelamed, JNS

Jewish groups mourned the death of Arvin Ghahramani after the news emerged earlier this month that the Iranian regime executed the 20-year-old Jew, whom it accused of murder after he killed a man in self-defense.

Rosa Parto, a freelance Iranian Jewish reporter in Amsterdam who was among the first Persian-language journalists to break the Ghahramani story earlier this year, told JNS that the Jewish community in Iran is “totally shocked at this sudden execution of Arvin.”

Ghahramani was involved in a street brawl with a Muslim man, Amir Shokri two years ago, according to a May report from an Iran-based outlet run by human rights activists. Shokri was reportedly killed during the fight, and Ghahramani was arrested, quickly tried and sentenced, per the report.

The Iranian Jewish activist George Haroonian, who co-founded the Los Angeles group “No To Antisemitism,” told JNS that the Iranian regime’s current Sharia laws permit the family of a victim in Iran to ask the state-run court not to enforce a death sentence if it agrees to receive diya, or blood money.

The Jewish community in Iran was “hopeful that he would somehow be released after the blood money was raised by community members to pay Shokri’s family,” Parto, the Amsterdam journalist, told JNS, of Ghahramani.

But ultimately, Shokri’s family “refused to take what they called ‘impure Jewish money’ and demanded Arvin be executed since he was a Jew,” she said.

Many Jews in Iran are upset with their leaders, who they say didn’t do enough to secure Ghahramani’s release in the past two years.

“Jewish community members in Iran I’ve spoken to are honestly furious at their leadership for ignoring Arvin’s case while he was rotting in jail for two years, being abused in jail, and only decided to finally intervene at the last minute when his death sentence was announced,” Parto told JNS.

The reporter said that she noticed that the initial arrest report for Ghahramani listed his religion as “Shi’ite Muslim,” which she saw as a red flag.

“I realized that Arvin had lied to the regime’s authorities in order to avoid being physically assaulted or sexually abused in prison by the guards if they realized he was a Jew arrested for killing a Muslim,” she told JNS. “It was only later when Arvin’s family and Jewish leaders came to visit him that the authorities found out he was a Jew, and matters got worse for him.”

News reports in and outside of Iran have neglected to mention that the Iranian regime rushed the execution due to its rampant Jew-hatred.

“No one is talking about the head Islamic cleric Habibollah Ghafoori, in the city of Kermanshah, who had been whipping up public Jew-hatred in recent weeks by demanding Arvin’s immediate execution,” Parto said.

“Also no one is talking about the current Jewish community leader, Homayoun Sameyah Najaf-Abadi, and his wife, who tried to visit the Shokri home in Kermanshah to resolve Arvin’s case but were chased out and threatened by the Shokri family members,” she said.

‘Hostages in waiting’

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told JNS that “Iranian Jews are in effect, hostages in waiting, subject to the whims of the corrupt mullah-ocracy.”

“Human life means nothing to a regime setting the Middle East ablaze,” he added.

The Iranian American Jewish Federations of New York and Los Angeles, which hadn’t commented publicly in May when Ghahramani was sentenced to death, released a joint statement on Nov. 6.

The groups “strongly” condemned the execution and said that they “believe in the sanctity of every life and condemn all acts of violence. We regret the death of Amir Shokri, but the answer to that should not have been the taking of another innocent life.”

“The Jewish community has had a presence in Iran for millennia. Throughout their history, they have contributed as patriotic and proud Iranian citizens,” the groups stated. “Credible reports suggest that Arvin Ghahramani was acting in self-defense when he used the deceased’s own knife during the altercation that resulted in the death.”

“We are at a loss to understand how the Islamic Republic’s judicial system arrived at this unjust conviction in the first place, the cruel sentence that was handed down subsequent to it, and the hastily conducted execution that followed in contradiction to their own Supreme Court’s instructions,” the groups added.

JNS sought comment from the U.S. State Department, the Iranian mission to the United Nations and the Ghahramani family in Iran.

‘Real crime was being a Jew’

Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, stated on social media that she is “dismayed” by the reported execution and that “the circumstances of the case and prosecution raise troubling questions about due process.”

Sam Yebri, a former president of the Los Angeles-based Iranian Jewish nonprofit group “30 Years After,” told JNS that “it is clear the fascist regime in Tehran executed this young man either to send a message to Israel or to send a message to the remaining Jews of Iran.”

“Either way, it is long past time for the world to stand up to the savage barbarians, who are holding the people of Iran and the entire Middle East hostage,” he said.

Sheila Nazarian, a plastic surgeon and Iranian Jewish activist in Los Angeles, told JNS that “we Jews need to take responsibility for our passiveness.”

“When an atrocity happens to our own, we do very little in comparison to other minority communities in America,” she said. “If we don’t make a big deal, how can we expect others to do it for us?”

Bijan Kian, co-founder of the Institute for Voices of Liberty in California, told JNS that “we protest the unjust and unfair trial and execution of Arvin Ghahramani through the courts in the Islamic Republic in Iran in the strongest form.”

“In the eyes of the terrorists-turned-judges in the Islamic Republic, Arvin’s real crime was being a Jew,” he said.

Matthew Nouriel, an Iranian Jewish activist in Los Angeles who works as the community engagement director at Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, told JNS that “the regime believes they can act with impunity and that must change.”

“There must be consequences for their actions beyond empty words from our world leaders,” he said.