Asher Aramnia: Iranian Matchmaker & Mitzvah-Seeker, 87

On July 9th the Los Angeles area Iranian Jewish community lost one of its deeply devoted community volunteers with the passing of 87-year-old Asher Aramnia. Popularly known as “Aram” or “Mr. Aram” to his close friends and family, he was a jovial businessman who worked tirelessly as a community volunteer for more than 40 years. Aram befriended me nearly 24 years ago when I first began working as a local reporter covering the news of the Iranian community. When many older Iranian Jews were still frightened or traumatized to openly speak about their past lives in Iran, Aram willingly provided me unique insights into the customs and lives of Iran’s Jews before the 1979 revolution. While many knew Aram as one of the community’s popular matchmakers, he was also constantly lending a helping hand or being a source of comfort to many in the local Iranian Jewish community.

Always the Proud Jew and Zionist

Aram was born in 1935 in the Jewish ghetto of the Iranian city of Shiraz. He frequently experienced horrific Jew hatred in his youth from local Muslims who chased down young Jewish children in the city’s streets to give them beatings for no reason. “Many of the young Muslims had pure blind hate for Jews because of the Islamic teachings they received from their families and in their mosques,” he said in a 2019 interview. Aram eventually moved to Iran’s capital city of Tehran and later obtained a degree in electrical engineering, a unique accomplishment for the Jews of his era who, prior to 1925, were barred from university education by the country’s Muslim majority. As an educated man, he worked as a director in Iran’s Ministry of Industry and Mining during the day but also worked as a math teacher in Jewish schools. To earn extra money, he also worked as a private math tutor to the children of wealthy Muslims. At the same time, Aram was heavily involved in Jewish community activities in Tehran. In the early 1950s with other Jewish friends, Aram formed the “Wiseman Society,” a group dedicated to promoting the cause of Zionism and offering news about Israel’s early years to Tehran’s Jewish youth.

Quintessential Community Volunteer

Unlike many Iranian Jews, Aram and his family left Iran in 1976, prior to the country’s Islamic revolution, in hopes of achieving the American dream. He first settled in San Diego, but in 1980 moved to Los Angeles to join his family members and other Iranian Jews who had resettled in the city after fleeing Iran. Since Aram had familiarity with life and business in America, he immediately joined the International Judea Foundation (SIAMAK), a local nonprofit Iranian Jewish group which was initially set up to help acculturate and resettle Iranian Jews who had moved to L.A. As a SIAMAK board member he worked tirelessly as a volunteer to help Iranian Jewish families find new work and housing in L.A. and get their children set up to attend local schools. After the success of Iranian Jewish resettlement, Aram still continued spending the last 40 plus years in performing other volunteer good deeds for his community, such as helping to resolve business disputes through private arbitration without seeking any compensation, regularly visiting countless sick individuals hospitalized and raising funds to cover the funeral and burial expenses for lower income Iranian Jews who had passed away. While Aram was involved in various business ventures during his life in America that were both successful and less profitable, it appeared to many of us who were his friends, that he sought to joyfully perform good deeds in the community with greater zeal and passion than making money.

Even though Aram never personally experienced the horrors of the 1979 Islamic revolution, he shared the painful story of his cousin, Nosrat Goel, who was executed in 1980 by the Khomeini regime’s thugs in Iran. Goel was a Jewish mother of four children from Shiraz who, at the time of her execution, was pregnant with her fifth child. Aram said the regime’s thugs were looking for an infamous prostitute in Shiraz by the name of “Zahra” and when they could not locate the prostitute, they randomly arrested Goel and claimed she was the prostitute they were required to arrest. While family members declined to publicly speak about this crime committed by Iran’s Islamic regime, Aram felt it necessary to speak with me on the record about it in order to have this heinous crime committed against an innocent Jew published for future historical purposes. 

Matchmaker, Matchmaker…

He was not your typical yenta and he was certainly not JDate.com, but Aram spent many afternoons over the years on a volunteer basis seeking to make local, national, and international love connections for Jewish singles of different backgrounds. “I know people think this is for women, but I don’t care about that,” Aram told me during a 2006 interview. “What’s important to me is the mitzvah of helping two single Jews find the loves of their life.” With countless successful matches to his credit, Aram’s matchmaking activities introduced Iranian Jewish singles of various ages to one another as well as Iranian Jews to American Jews and Jews from Mexico and South America. “The secret to our success is not asking them what they want, but rather asking what they don’t want in a mate or would despise in a mate,” Aram explained. “This allows us to better match up couples.”

His volunteer matchmaking efforts began more than 30 years ago as a part of the SIAMAK organization’s “Peyvand-e-Delha” (Union of Hearts) program which helped bring together dozens of Jewish couples. With Aram’s help, the nonprofit helped divorced Iranian Jews in Southern California to meet potential mates and was called “Another Spring” since at that time it was taboo in the community for divorced people to remarry. Interestingly, Aram and Shaheen, his wife of more than 60 years, often stayed up late on weeknights to keep in touch with singles he had introduced. In recent years, Aram even expanded his local volunteer matchmaking efforts for Iranian Jews by starting the MyGhesmat.com website, where Jews of all ages could fill out an online application and be matched by him. “He was truly a special angel doing nothing but good in our community for many years. There will never be another community volunteer like him,” said Dariush Fakheri, SIAMAK’s past president and Aram’s close friend of more than 40 years.

Aram is survived by his wife, four children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.