25,000 Jews left in Iran in spite of Ahmadinejad: Why?...

Clue: It's never so simple.

The American Jewish daily, the Forward is reporting that in spite of various campaigns, Iran’s 25,000 Jews are reluctant to leave the Islamic Republic of Iran, their native homeland, even though the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, has threatened wipe Israel off the map and who hosted a conference this fall to, as the Forward says, “assess" the Holocaust.

Jews have lived in Iran for some 3,000 years when Cyrus the Great, credited with the first human rights code, gave them refuge. According to the Forward, 80 percent of the Iranian Jewish community has emigrated since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

The Forward reports that Iranian Jews are still able to practice their religion freely in Iran, since Judaism is a recognized religious faith. They are exempt from the Islamic Republic’s prohibition against alcohol.

“Iranian Jews have a comfortable Jewish life,” Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Middle East analyst now living in Israel is quoted as saying. As long as they don’t criticize the Iranian regime and don’t publicly speak out in favor of Israel, he told the Forward the regime leaves them alone for the most part. Jews are also banned from holding government jobs and from becoming officers in the army.

According to what Amir Cyrus Razzaghi told the Forward, it is in the interest of the Islamic regime to make sure Iranian Jews are able to live relatively freely in Iran to, as Razzaghi says, "demonstrate to the world that the goverment is anti-Israel and not anti-Jewish."

Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Iranian-American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, had a different point of view. He told the Forward that Iranian Jews are mostly elderly and only speak Persian and because of these reasons are afraid of leaving Iran.