The Persian-Jewish community in Los Angeles is, by most counts, the largest concentration of Iranian Jews anywhere in the world outside Iran itself. Roughly 40,000 people, anchored on the western side of the city, with institutional life centered on a handful of synagogues, a Persian-Jewish day school, and a thick mesh of professional and family networks.
What it does not, until recently, have is an archive.
That is changing. A project housed at UCLA’s Iranian Jewish Oral History Center has been quietly assembling, over the past five years, a documentary record of the community that did not exist in any consolidated form. The project — initially funded by a single bequest from a Beverly Hills jeweler whose family arrived in 1979 — now has ninety hours of recorded oral history, six thousand digitized family photographs, and a growing collection of objects: ketubot, copper prayer plates, identity documents, business ledgers from Tehran.
The project’s director, Houman Sarshar, is the same scholar who edited the foundational 2002 volume The Jews of Iran and whose later books traced the community’s modern history through the lens of family papers. The archive he is building now is one step further along: it is the community telling itself, on tape and in scan, for the first time in a form that future researchers can use.
What the project has surfaced is uneven and quietly stunning.
The recorded testimony from arrivals in 1978 and 1979 — most now in their seventies and eighties — has, in particular, captured a level of granular detail that survives in no other written source. The mechanics of how families exited Iran. The role of specific consulates in specific months. The price of specific bribes. The careful logistics of leaving real estate behind in the hopes of returning. The neighbors who helped. The neighbors who didn’t.
The earlier-generation material — testimony from people who emigrated in the 1950s and 1960s, before the Revolution, who came to the United States for graduate school and stayed — captures a different community: smaller, more elite, more academically credentialed, and more loosely tied to the institutional structures that the 1979 cohort would later build out.
The archive’s biggest open question is how to handle material that is politically sensitive in Iran. The community’s relatives, business partners, and in some cases parents still live there. A 2024 internal review of the project’s release policy concluded that no testimony could be released with specific personal-identifier detail attached to anyone with relatives in-country, even if the testimony was given on the record. That decision has slowed the archive’s public release. Most of the material is currently only accessible to vetted researchers under reading-room protocols.
That, the project’s leadership argues, is the right pace. The archive will outlast the politics. The people who recorded it, in most cases, will not.