07 January 2008
Iran’s main Jewish organization has denied any involvement in a secret Israeli operation to transport a group of 40 Iranian Jews to Israel. "Iranian Jews affirm that considering the good living conditions of religious minorities in Iran," the Tehran Jewish Committee said in a statement. At the end of last month a group of ten Iranian families and three individuals arrived in Israel via an unnamed third country in a covert operation that marked the biggest recent influx of Iranian Jews to the Jewish state. The president of the Tehran Jewish Committee, Siamak More-Sedegh, and the Jewish member of parliament, Morris Motamed said that Iranian Jews would “never exchange their identity for money.”
Despite the bitter enmity between the two countries, a record number of 200 Jews emigrated from Iran last year alone, according to the Jewish Agency, the Jewish immigration body. Hostility between Israel and Iran deepened after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map and predicted that it is doomed to disappear. Iran’s Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel, but out of some 100,000 Jews who lived there before the 1979 Islamic revolution, only around 25,000 remain today.
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