Earlier this month, an estimated 50,000 people came out to a rally organized by Iranian Canadians in downtown Richmond Hill, Ont. The event was a show of support for the freedom protests currently going on across Iran being led by women and girls, a reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who is largely believed to have been beaten to death by police for not covering enough hair with her hijab.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government has announced sanctions on Iran, banning 10,000 members of the Iranian goverment and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from entering the country and laundering money here.
Watching all this unfold has been Dyanoosh Youssefi, a Jewish lawyer and human rights activist living in Toronto. Born in Iran, she and her family lived through the Iranian Revolution and escaped in 1982, when Youssefi was 11, with just the clothes on their backs and some jewellery sewn into their coats. Youssefi joins The CJN Daily to break down the current situation and explain why it matters to Canadian Jews.
What we talked about:
- Visit Dyanoosh Youssefi’s website, dyanooshyoussefi.ca
- Read Youssefi’s 2014 essay on being mistaken for a Muslim woman, in The CJN archives
Transcript
Crowd chanting:
Woman Life Freedom. Woman Life Freedom. Woman Life Freedom.
Ellin Bessner:
That’s what it sounded like earlier this month when an estimated 50,000 people came out in downtown Richmond Hill, Ontario, to a rally organized by Iranian Canadians. It was a show of support for the freedom protests now going on across Iran, led by mainly women and girls, which started after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, on September 16.
The young Kurdish Iranian woman had been picked up by Iran’s morality police and taken to a re-education centre because they accused her of showing too much hair under her mandatory headscarf. Meanwhile, the Canadian government has now announced sanctions on Iran, banning 10,000 members of the Iranian government and its Revolutionary Guard from coming to Canada and laundering money here. But Ottawa still hasn’t designated them as terrorists.
And watching it all unfold has been Dyanoosh Youseffi. She’s a Jewish lawyer and human rights activist in Toronto. She was born in Iran, and she and her family lived through the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which turned the entire country into an Islamic republic that’s now been in power for over 40 years.
When Dyanoosh was 11, she and her family escaped from Tehran with just the coats on their backs and some jewelry sewn into their coats. Now she hopes the current protests will finally end the regime’s long clampdown on freedom.
Dyanoosh Youssefi:
I think the hope, the aim, is that there will be enough awareness and enough pressure from the general population so that Western governments will take steps that will actually help to affect change in government.
Ellin Bessner:
I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Thursday, October 13, 2022. Welcome to the CJN Daily, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News sponsored by Metropia.
MUSIC
Jews have lived in Iran for nearly 3,000 years, since the destruction of the first Temple sent them into exile. And you know that Iran was Persia, the setting for the Purim story of Esther and Mordechai, who got the King of Persia to save the Jews from being wiped out by Hamman. In modern day Iran, Judaism is still recognized as an official religion, and worship is permitted. There are about 20,000 Iranian Jews, but they still walk a tricky tightrope. Zionists are demonized, and Iran’s supreme leader regularly calls for Israel’s destruction, not to mention funding terror groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
Dyanoosh Youssefi joins us now from Toronto to break down the current Iranian protest movement and explain why this struggle needs support from the international community and Canada’s Jews.
Ellin:
Maybe we can start before we talk about the current protests. We’ll go back a bit in time, if that’s all right with you. And talk a bit about how your family lived in Iran and how they got to Canada.
Dyanoosh:
Sure.
Ellin:
You were bat mitzvah age, were you not, when you came to live in Canada? What was the journey before you got here? Why did you decide to leave and tell us a little bit about who your family was then?
Dyanoosh:
Yeah, we left in 82 and I was eleven. And in fact, since you mentioned the Bar and bat mitzvah, my parents had a huge party shortly before we left, really for my brother’s bar mitzvah, but it was also my bat mitzvah too, kind of thing. And while my parents knew already at that point that we were going to leave soon, but they had not told anyone else and they really couldn’t, you had to keep that to yourself just in case it slipped out. And if it did, then obviously the authorities would try to stop us. So we had that big party right before we left, and for my parents it was that bitter sweet because it was such a wonderful event. We had over 100 people in our home and in fact they did serve alcohol, if I recall correctly. And I could be wrong. Technically there was some exemption that if you weren’t Muslim you could have alcohol, but you just didn’t do it anyway because you could still get in trouble. You didn’t want to have the police come and check on things. They invited the neighbours too. You want to make sure that nobody complains. They invited everybody. And we left Iran by escaping. That’s how a lot of people did leave at the time, and particularly Jews, because we were not permitted to leave. So we escaped from Tehran to a small village that was by the Iranian/Pakistani border, and from there through Pakistan and from Karachi to Islamabad, from there to Spain. We were in Spain for five months and my parents applied to both Canada and the U.S. Canada took us first, so we came here and my uncle was already here. I have an uncle who in the late 1960s came to Canada and studied at Ryerson, he studied engineering, and after many years, came back to Iran, got married and then returned to Canada. So we already had some direct family here.
Ellin:
And you were a family of how many? Who was in the family?
Dyanoosh:
There are five of us. My parents, my brother, who’s two years older than me, and my sister. It was her second birthday. The day we left, we ran, actually, and she got to spend it on the back of a pickup truck. They’d given her some medication to help to have her fall asleep, actually, so that we could be hidden because we were covered in the back of the pickup truck.
Ellin:
They were allowed to practice their religion, right? It was an accepted religion, as far as I understood, but there were not the freedoms that you have here in the West.
Dyanoosh:
Yes, certainly Jews and Christians, both religions are considered valid under Islam and we were allowed to practice, but we had to be cautious and a lot of the freedoms that existed before the revolution were taken away. But even before the Revolution, as Jews, we would be careful not to necessarily advertise that we’re Jewish because it was not always known who would be friend and not but after the Revolution everybody was more careful because there was a greater fear of being questioned, being stopped, being harassed because we’re Jewish, both by officials from the government who maybe weren’t even necessarily acting on any orders. It just kind of gave some folks a cart blanche to harrass.
But for me as a child, most of it was on a different level. It was things like so in school we were careful. The students knew that I’m Jewish, but for example, we were ranked students were ranked based on our averages. It was kind of a big deal. In Iran, academics were really held in a very different view, I found, than here when I came here. And I came second, and I know that they demoted me to third because I was Jewish. It’s a big deal. But it was small, too at the time.
Or there was a student who, when the teacher rearranged our seats in Grade Four, she said, I’m not going to sit next to that dirty Jew. Those are the kinds of things which, and I’m not downplaying them, which may have happened before the Revolution too, some of it, but after the Islamic Republic came to power, there was a fair bit more power and legitimacy behind the antisemitism in the sense that people felt freer to act on it. But our neighbours knew that were Jewish, we had family friends who were Muslims. It was just that ever present sense of being careful, being careful not to just offer the information to anyone because we didn’t know how they might be.
Ellin:
Did you have to wear a head covering? What was that like? Because you were eleven?
Dyanoosh:
Yeah, absolutely. Everybody did. It didn’t matter if you were from a different religion and it was not age based, you weren’t in elementary school, we wore the head cover, which in school it’s not just the scarf that you tied, it was the one that covers your forehead and covers your chin and just goes down to above your chest. And then the school uniform had pants and over them was the looser uniform that had long sleeves and went down to the knees.
Ellin:
And so you got here and let’s fast forward to now, I know you’ve been watching, of course, the protests. Personally, what’s it been like for you to watch what’s been happening?
Dyanoosh:
It’s both incredible and scary and also not terribly surprising. Any time there’s oppression that continues for this long, eventually people will protest and will try to end it. We saw it in 2009 as well. This one just does feel different. The momentum here feels different. The defiance seems to be on a much higher level. And even the backing, the reaction of the rest of the world seems to be different as well. There’s more people, more people who are not connected to Iran that seemed to be aware of it and behind it, I might even say interested. But it’s also a very different kind of world than it was even in 2009. The impact of social media is incredible because you get to see first hand and immediately what’s going on. Our hearts hurt and are both filled with hope. For the people that we’re watching.
Ellin:
What connection do you have with the non-Jewish Iranian community in Toronto and Canada? And what are they asking you to do or what are you offering to do? What have you been doing, if anything?
Dyanoosh:
But for people who are really actively involved, and in fact they do want to see an end to the regime, what they want is they want people to participate. So go to the protests. They want people to raise awareness. There’s quite a few Iranians who have a strong following on social media and they use that to raise awareness. But they’re asking people to do the same, to raise awareness, I think, with the ultimate goal, because ultimately all of this is only effective, if it leads to change.
The ultimate goal is to ensure that our government here in the West and our European governments, take steps that will make Iran more accountable and that might result in true change. It really depends on who you speak to. There’s definitely folks who want the current regime to be labeled as terrorists. There’s people who want really much more significant steps taken. And the decision that the Canadian government has made now will only be effective if they can take those steps fairly immediately. I mean, if you’re going to stop people from coming and you’ve announced it, but in the meantime a few dozen of them leave Iran and come here or go to other places, then it won’t have the same impact. Obviously if you’re going to freeze people’s assets, you have to do it fairly quickly. So the question of how fast is this going to happen? And so much of this was on social media. There’s no confirmation, but I did see a Tweet earlier about an Iranian official who seems to have purchased property in the north of Toronto.
Ellin:
I heard that.
You’ve been working for social justice for years in your career. How should the Jewish community, what should the Jewish community be doing?
Dyanoosh:
I think that the first step is always greater awareness. And if we talk about the Jewish larger community, I think there’s a lot of misconceptions or just not knowing enough about the Iranian community. In fact, I imagine among Jewish people who are watching and I don’t think everybody is, but who are watching, there’s probably a lack of awareness that not all Iranians are anti-Israel.
In fact, there are certainly instances of Iranians who have defied orders or have gone out of their way to not condemn Israel, that they’re not buying it anymore. From time to time you see people speaking about their anger at the Iranian government for supporting Hamas. That could be in part because they feel like, ‘Hey, we are all suffering here. What are you doing supporting that organization?’ It could also be that the recognition that the animosity towards Israel is a scapegoat. It’s used to deflect from problems within the Iranian government itself. The actual declaration that ‘No, we’re not going to buy into your anti-American anti-Israel rhetoric’, which is not to say that the U.S. or Israel are beyond criticism. Of course there’s tons to criticize. But it’s the refusal to say ‘We will allow you to use those countries to deflect from all the things that you bring upon us as a country’. So those are incredible moments. And again, having even the minimal conversations I’ve had with some Iranians here, I’ve become aware myself of the diversity and of the friendship that can exist, that does exist, between Iranian Muslims and Jews.
Ellin:
I think a lot of people would be surprised at that because I think most people think Iranians all hate Israel and all are antisemites, right? So there might be that sort of reluctance to get involved.
Dyanoosh:
I would say a couple of things to that. One is, who do you build bridges with? It’s not with people who are already your friends, they’re already coming to your home. You have to do it with the people that either you see as your enemies, although I’m not calling Iranian people enemies here at all. You build bridges with the people with whom you don’t have that connection. So you have to reach out. It is especially in these times when it’s important to reach out. It’s especially important for the Jewish community. And you know what? Even from a completely selfish perspective, if as Jews, we don’t reach out to people and build bridges when they need us, we are the ones who are going to be left alone.
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Ellin:
Dyanoosh has also written several columns for The CJN in the past and so we put a link to her website and some of her articles in our show notes for you. If you want to learn more about how to support the Canadian Iranian community, send me an email and I’ll connect you with some of the organizers. I’m at [email protected].
And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily, sponsored by Metropia: integrity, community, quality and customer care.
Today’s listener shout out goes to Tamar Freeman, a retired Canadian army medic who served in Afghanistan, and she listens to our show from her home in BC.
And we’ll end with a little note on the commercial we’ve been playing all month at the top of the show. If you haven’t listened carefully, you should, because it’s promoting the upcoming concert by three winners of the Israeli Music Prize. And one of these winners is an Iranian Canadian composer, Iman Habibi. He isn’t Jewish, but the piece he is premiering next week is a tribute to a famous Jewish Persian poet who went by the name of Shahin Shirazi. The poet lived 700 years ago and wrote thousands of pages of poems based on the Torah. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back on Wednesday after Simchat Torah.
Credits
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