Welcome to Jewish Iran

Iran is home to the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel, with a history dating back 3,000 years to the time of Cyrus the Great. The Shrine of Esther and two of the sites purported to be the Tomb of Daniel are both in Iran.

Tuneful Jewish prayers echoed off the elaborate blue tiles inside the synagogue – an interior that could pass for a mosque were it not for the Hebrew inscriptions and menorah – as the worshippers bowed left and right.

The men, with their yarmulkes, were packed on the benches downstairs, while upstairs the women, in brightly coloured headscarves, alternated between praying and gossiping. Their chit-chat grew so loud that the rabbi broke off several times to shush them.

The Friday night ceremony over, they poured out into the leafy street. “Shabbat Shalom,” they said, before launching into the long Farsi pleasantries that constitute an Iranian greeting.

Welcome to Jewish Iran – a 25,000-strong community in a country whose populist president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, has denied the Holocaust and called for the Jewish state’s demise.