October 13, 2007

Sam Cohan recently completed his residency. As he looked for a job locally, his student loans weighed on him. The 30-something Iranian Jew had grown up middle class in the Valley and had to take out the loans to pay for his education at a prestigious medical school.

With no immediate prospect for income, he found himself caught between feelings of frustration and guilt as his fiancee, her parents and his parents pressured him into a wedding he couldn’t afford.

Cohan didn’t want to break with Iranian tradition or disappoint either family, so he borrowed nearly $100,000 to cover the wedding expenses.

“I felt trapped with the whole situation and wanted to call everything off, but I decided to take the loan in the end because my wife agreed that we’d both work and pay it off little by little,” said Cohan, who asked that The Journal not reveal his real name.

Cohan is one of a growing number of young Iranian Jewish professionals who, due to family pressure, are incurring large debts to pay for lavish weddings.

Somewhere between keeping Iranian hospitality traditions and one-upping displays of wealth, a growing number of Iranian Jewish families today are inviting upward of 500 guests to weddings, with budgets in the six-figure range—typically from $150,000 to $300,000.

The strain of such expectations has led to infighting between families over who should cover the cost. Young professionals are also postponing marriage plans or opting instead for a destination wedding to avoid the financial pressures of holding the event in Los Angeles.

Most local Iranian Jews acknowledge the situation, but few in the community are willing to advocate for change. Rabbi Hillel Benchimol, associate rabbi of the Nessah Synagogue in Beverly Hills, wants a greater dialogue on the issue.

“The problem is we are taking out the spiritual and emotional aspect of the marriage and instead it’s become a business with all the unnecessary spending,” Benchimol said. “People forget the spirit of the wedding—all you need is love, and everything else falls into place.”

Some young Iranian Jewish newlyweds say that while they did not necessarily want a large wedding, they feel pressure from their parents and extended family to put on a more lavish affair. Their parents, they say, feel an obligation to invite people whose parties they have attended.

“Persians have much more of a tight-knit community, and it’s very respect oriented—that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it leads to 300- to 400-person weddings,” said Ario Fakheri, who was married last year. “People get upset if you don’t invite their kids or grandmothers, they look at it as disrespecting them—there are so many ways to disrespect them.”

Fakheri said that while he and his fiancee invited almost 600 people to their wedding due to family pressure, many of his friends in the community are opting to have destination weddings.

“You can tell how bad they don’t want people to come to their wedding by how far away they go,” Fakheri said. “It’s basically code for how bad you want to have a normal wedding.”

Iranian Jewish religious leaders said the cost has resulted in several weddings being called off and some couples divorcing within a few months of getting married. There’s also concern that local Iranian Jews will marry outside of the community or outside of the faith in order to escape the mounting six-figure wedding pressure.

Community activists trace the growing trend back two or three years ago when local Iranian Jews began inviting 100 to 200 guests for their children’s bale boroon parties.

The bale boroon is a traditional Iranian courtship gathering prior to the engagement, during which a dozen members from the male suitor’s family visits with a small contingent from the woman’s family. During the gathering both families acknowledge the upcoming union and offer a small gift to one another.

“Today, when they have these large parties for the bale boroon, they must then top that with something bigger for the engagement party, and as a result the wedding must be an even bigger extravaganza than the other parties,” said Asher Aramnia, events director for the Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center in Tarzana.

(Asher Aramnia, photo by Karmel Melamed)

Aramnia, who also volunteers as a Jewish matchmaker, said the recent trend of expensive weddings were not the norm in Iran.

“In Iran we didn’t even have catering. The family members cooked the food or those who were well-off hired one private cook,” he said. “Here I’ve been to a wedding where the groom bought the bride a cherry-red BMW and put it on display at the entrance of the hotel for all the guests to see.”

Aramnia said at another wedding he witnessed a diamond-encrusted tiara being lowered from the ceiling onto the bride’s head.

Venus Safaie, a local Iranian wedding planner with 85 percent of her clients hailing from an Iranian Jewish background, said the highest costs for most weddings she helps organize come from securing a venue at a hotel and finding Persian-language singers, who charge $8,000 to $15,000 for two or three hours of entertainment.

“Well, you have to realize that these Persian singers charge more because the cost of living has gone up, and there are not that many of them around, so they can ask whatever price they want,” Safaie said. “Also people agree to pay them these high prices, so you can’t blame the singers.”

Dara Abaei, head of the L.A. nonprofit Jewish Unity Network, said his organization has been urging families to have smaller weddings. The group has also negotiated with certain vendors to give reduced fees to couples struggling to pay for their weddings.

“We’re trying to break the cycle in the community, to get them to not have engagement parties or get smaller engagement parties and try to share the cost of wedding,” he said.

Abaei said couples can save between $7,000 to $15,000 if they hold their weddings at the banquet halls of Iranian American Jewish Federation’s synagogue in West Hollywood, the Nessah Synagogue in Beverly Hills and the Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center in Tarzana.

Another group, Woodland Hills-based Mayan Kheset, provides silk flower centerpieces in lieu of real flowers. The organization’s volunteers drop off and pick up the arrangements, and only ask that couples donate the money they would have spent on flowers.

“We encourage people to try to support a wedding of an orphan in Israel,” said Hirbod Cohentoe, Mayan Kheset’s founder. “We encourage couples not make their weddings so fancy, but donate some of the money to Israel or their favorite Jewish charity.”

While many local activist and religious leaders are trying to encourage Iranian Jewish families to have smaller weddings, others are calling for more radical steps to be taken.

“I have always wanted to see a revolution occur in the community when two or three affluent families that everyone knows very well, invite only 200 or 300 close relatives and friends for their weddings,” Aramnia said. “This will cause others who are trying to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ to copy them, and it may help solve our problem.”

Despite the community’s struggles to keep with old traditions and grapple with the high cost of weddings, experts said the pressure on young couples to have larger weddings is common in almost every culture worldwide.

“Well, there’s an old saying, ‘Every woman gets to plan a wedding—her daughter’s,’” said Dr. Sharona Nazarian, an Iranian Jewish psychologist. “It’s not just because we’re Persian or Jewish that we’re concerned. It’s universal, something that many brides and grooms have to deal with.”

While members of the local Iranian Jewish community said they were not opposed to those who had the financial means to have expensive weddings, they hoped others without such means would reconsider spending when they have to incur large debts.

“If someone can comfortably afford to spend lavishly on the wedding, that is their choice,” Nazarian said. “But it’s also important for families to work within their own means and be more concerned with their own needs as opposed to what others think about them.”

The September release of a new documentary that follows Jimmy Carter on tour for his controversial book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” has reignited the longstanding animosity many Iranian Americans feel toward the former U.S. president.

The film, “Man From Plains”, reveals the sharp criticism Carter faced from Jewish groups for comparing Israeli actions toward Palestinians to the oppression of South Africa’s former apartheid regime.

Among Iranians—whether Jews, Muslims, Christians or Zoroastrians, the majority of whom have been living in the United States for nearly 30 years—Carter is still blamed for the fall of the pro-American regime of the late Shah of Iran. Many also hold Carter responsible for the loss of innocent lives and of the vast fortunes they were forced to leave behind after the 1979 overthrow of the Pahlavi government.

“I dislike Carter so much that I hate to have my name ‘Jimmy’ the same as his name,” said Jimmy Delshad, an Iranian Jew and mayor of Beverly Hills.

“Not only did Carter cause problems for Jews and non-Jews who were forced out of Iran, but he changed the whole dynamic of the Middle East by his backing of Khomeini, and that has had a whole ripple effect in the Middle East, which America is still trying to recover from,” Delshad said, referring to the Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, who led the revolutionary, fundamentalist Islamic Republic.

The Carter film is just one in a series of recent events that have rekindled Iranian Americans’ painful memories of Carter. In May, when Carter referred to the current Bush administration as “the worst in history,” many Iranian Americans charged that that title actually belongs to Carter’s administration.

“I think Jimmy Carter’s integrity is questioned,” said Dr. Solomon Meskin, an Iranian Jewish resident of Beverly Hills. “The fact that he doesn’t even acknowledge the kind of things that are going on in the Arab world and Muslim countries, where people have their rights totally ignored, and he instead cites Israel for apartheid, is totally ridiculous.”

Frank Nikbakht, director of the L.A.-based Committee for Minority Rights in Iran, said Iranian Americans are particularly angry at Carter and his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who encouraged the revolution in Iran because they believed an Islamic government in Iran would help encircle the former Soviet Union and decimate Iran’s communists.

“During and following a regime such as the Shah’s, which was so dependent on the U.S. and Britain, nothing like this—the participation of the army and the Iranian secret police (SAVAK) in the handover—could have happened without their approval,” Nikbakht said.

In July 2003, when General Alexander Haig, NATO commander during the Carter Administration, gave a speech at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, he was the first U.S. official to publicly discuss Carter’s complicity in toppling the Shah’s regime. Haig indicated that he resigned his post at NATO after discovering the administration had turned its back on the Shah.

Further indications of Carter’s activities in ousting the Shah were revealed in a 2004 article in “Nameh,” a Persian-language magazine based in Iran that is now defunct. In an interview, Ibrahim Yazdi, a close confidant and former representative of Khomeini to Western nations, described extensive correspondence from Carter in 1978, prior to the revolution.

“These correspondences were going on long before the Shah left Iran, and Khomeini had promised Carter in a letter that he would not disturb the flow of oil from Iran if he came to power,” Yazdi is quoted as saying. “Then Carter, in his last correspondence to Khomeini, said the Shah will be leaving soon and asked Khomeini to return to Iran. Carter believed Iran should have an Islamic government, and I agreed with him.”

In her book “Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution” (Yale University Press 2003), UCLA professor emeritus Nikki Keddie cites William H. Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Iran, who said Brzezinski “repeatedly assured the Shah that the U.S. backed him fully,” but Carter failed to follow up on those assurances. High-level officials in the State Department believed the revolution was unstoppable.

Keddie writes that Carter could not decide how to stabilize Iran and was against another coup; his failure to move quickly plunged the country into a fundamentalist Islamic regime.

Habib Levy’s “A Comprehensive History of The Jews of Iran” (Mazda Publishers, 1999), describes how the unprecedented tolerance and prosperity Jews and other religious minorities in Iran experienced during the Pahlavi dynasty were lost after the revolution.

Although the majority of Iranian Americans have prospered in the United States since they continue to harbor ill will over their losses. Abraham Berookhim, a resident of Santa Monica, is one of many local Iranian Jews who said he holds Carter personally accountable for his family’s devastation; Iran’s radical Islamic regime confiscated not only his family’s multimillion dollar hotel in Tehran, but also executed his uncle in 1980 as a “Zionist spy.”

“In my opinion, Carter is the worst human being in the world,” Berookhim said. “Carter saw how cruel Khomeini was to the people of Iran who were being killed for no reason, and he did nothing.”

Delshad and other local Iranian Jews also say Carter fostered the atmosphere of hatred and discrimination they encountered after Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Iran were taken hostage by the Iranian regime in 1979.

“It was very hostile time for Persians living here. Everywhere I went, I was picked on,” Delshad said. “I started wearing American flags on my lapel all the time to show that I was an American and to let people who met me [know] not to include me as part of those hostage-takers in Iran”.

Nevertheless, a few Iranian Jewish leaders applaud Carter’s immigration polices.

“Iranian Jews also remember the gentle side of President Carter’s administration, which opened the doors to the migration of a large segment of our community to the United States,” said Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the L.A.-based Iranian American Jewish Federation.

Others point out that that Carter is not the only one responsible for the ongoing situation in Iran. H. David Nahai, an Iranian Jewish attorney and president of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power, said “We should also not forget that while the revolution took place during Carter, it became entrenched during Republican administrations.”

Yet dislike for Carter is not limited to Iranian Jews alone, countless Iranians of other faiths said they also have ill feelings for the former president.

“I believe that there is no hope for Carter’s redemption in Iranian history,” said Assadollah Morovati, the Iranian Muslim owner of Radio Sedaye Iran (KRSI), a Persian language satellite-radio station based in Beverly Hills. “He has already done immense damage to our culture, our lives, and our reputation in the world by helping to bring the current regime to power and he will never be forgiven by all Iranians”.

Today as the Iran’s strength and influences increase in the Middle East, scholars looking back on the regime’s rise to power cannot help but trace it to the actions of the Carter Administration.

“The Carter Administration’s role in assisting with the downfall of the Shah is one of America’s great foreign policy disasters of the twentieth century,” stated Dinesh D’Souza, a Stanford University research fellow in an online report published this January. “America doesn’t need more foolish advice from Jimmy Carter, what it needs from him is an apology”.