cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/42956

Religion News Service (4/9/26): “The synagogue was leveled in a strike overnight Monday (April 6) before the ceasefire was declared, one of scores of religious and cultural heritage sites destroyed or significantly damaged by the war led by Israeli and US forces.”

An Israeli missile attack destroyed a Tehran synagogue during the Jewish Passover holiday (Religion News Service, 4/9/26). The Israeli military “expressed regret over what it called ‘collateral damage’ to a synagogue in Tehran caused by an overnight strike,” which was “targeting a senior Iranian commander,” said the Middle East Eye (4/7/26).

Photos of the wreckage at the Rafi-Nia Synagogue have accompanied many of these pieces. The Council on American-Islamic relations condemned the attack in a statement (4/7/26):

We strongly condemn the Israeli regime’s bombing of a synagogue in Tehran, which was the predictable end result of the indiscriminate US/Israel bombing campaign against mosques, hospitals, schools, apartments and other civilian sites across Iran.

The group challenged “various Israel advocacy groups and politicians that support this war in the name of protecting Israel to condemn Israel’s synagogue attack.”

Buried at best

The Wall Street Journal headline (4/7/26) refers to the “damage” Israel did to a Tehran synagogue—similar to the “damage” done to the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda.

The story of the attack on the Tehran synagogue was, at best, buried in the US corporate media. CNN posted a brief video (4/7/26) about the bombing but had no online article about it. The New York Times (4/7/26, 4/7/26) mentioned the attack, but as background in broader stories about the US/Israel war on Iran.

A search for “Rafi-Nia” on the Washington Post website yields no results. Ditto for the AP, although the news service did post a video to YouTube (4/7/26). Al Jazeera’s coverage (4/7/26) of the attack was a mélange of AP and AFP copy. CBS News (4/7/26) also used a few paragraphs of AFP copy to report on the attack, although it was buried in the middle of a general timeline about the war.

The Wall Street Journal (4/7/26) had the story, but led with Israel’s contrition over the destruction; that’s not a journalistic construction we see in US news coverage when it comes to the Israeli bombings of other civilian structures in Iran, Gaza or Lebanon. When Israel destroys a hospital, apartment building, encampment, etc., the stories don’t lead with official regret, but rather include Israeli claims that the civilian facilities were actually legitimate military targets. The Journal’s lead provided the government with public relations cover over the sensitive issue of destroying a Jewish house of worship.

Newsweek (4/8/26), once a bigger player in the US media landscape, led with condemnation of the attack from Jewish Iranian leaders, who declared “their unwavering solidarity with Iran in defending the homeland.”

Jewish presence in Iran

Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Iranian Jewish community sees itself as part of the broader Iranian society rather than as an extension of Israel.”

Underplaying the story obscures not only the wantonness of Israel’s aggression, but the actual nature of Iranian society, which is portrayed as obsessed with wiping Jews off the map (ADL, 6/25/25). “Iranian foreign policy freely mixes anti-Israel furies with anti-Jewish ones,” wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/13/26), a pro-war cheerleader (2/22/26, 3/24/26).

In fact, while Israel is obviously the center of Mideastern Jewish life, the Iranian Jewish population dwarfs those elsewhere in the Middle East. “Estimates range from 9,000 to 20,000 Jews currently living in Iran,” according to the Forward (6/18/25).

Wrote the Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Jewish presence in Iran is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, with roots that historians trace back more than two millennia.”

Yes, Iran is a theocracy; the government is no model for an open society. But there is a Jewish member of Iran’s parliament, who even went on record this year openly criticizing Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s handling of popular unrest (i24, 1/29/26).

‘Well-protected second-class citizens’

Reporting on Judaic studies in the holy city of Qom, the Forward‘s Larry Cohler-Esses (8/27/15) writes of “the absolute distinction between Judaism and Zionism that the [Iranian] government makes.”

US media have covered the Jews of Iran before. USA Today (8/29/18) did a story in 2018, reporting from Tehran. Former Forward reporter Larry Cohler-Esses (8/12/15, 8/12/15, 8/18/15, 8/27/15) reported extensively and critically on Iranian Jews, indicating that the country was at least open to letting a reporter for a Jewish publication do their job.

Cohler-Esses told FAIR that Jews in Iran are “well-protected second-class citizens.” In fact, when he read about the attack, he “wondered if it was the synagogue I spent Shabbat in, but it wasn’t,” because there are more than a dozen active synagogues in Tehran—a reflection of the size of the Jewish community there.

Recalling his 2015 reporting trip, Cohler-Esses said that on Shabbat, Jews would spill out of their synagogues and mingle in the street after services, a sight he didn’t often see in many places in Europe. In one instance, after he left a synagogue service, one of the congregants ran after him through a street teeming with people, wearing a kippah and a tallit (traditional religious attire), and “no one batted an eye.”

The Jews of Iran do suffer discrimination, because Muslims are favored in the legal code over all non-Muslims, Cohler-Esses said. He noted that the Jewish population of Iran has shrunk significantly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“Iranian Jews are viewed by Iranians as indigenous,” he said. “They’re the original Bundists,” a nod to the Jewish political movement that “stood not just for socialism, but for do’ikayt—Yiddish for ‘hereness,’” the concept that a Jew’s homeland was in whatever nation they resided in (New York Times, 4/6/26).

Cohler-Esses was hopeful that coverage of the synagogue’s destruction in Israeli press (JTA, 4/7/26; Jerusalem Post, 4/7/26) had the “potential to make Jewish readers of Jewish media outlets go, ‘Oh, they have synagogues there.’” But with the underplaying of the story in US media, it’s a missed teachable moment for news consumers generally.

More robust press coverage of the attack could have taught Americans that the Jews of Iran do have something to fear: Israel.

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