Anyone with Persian cousins, as I have, had heard this story in its many sad, sometimes miraculous variations

Moussa Chacham-Tzedek was a wealthy Persian businessman whose nephew, a rav I know, connected us. As we sat in his Jerusalem mansion, Amu (“Uncle”) Moussa revealed to me that he’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness — but that wasn’t why he summoned me. He was about to reveal a part of his life that had haunted him until now.  PART II

Amu Moussa recounted how he’d grown up in a wealthy family of merchants in a Jewish suburb of Tehran.

The Shah had championed sweeping national modernization and his family’s import-export business profited immensely from the Shah’s policies. The family had summer homes, winter homes, servants, and not the slightest concern that things would change for the worse in the not-too-distant future.

“My father’s brother, Amu Mansour, told the family he was leaving the business to move to Israel. ‘Why should you be such a Zionist?’ my father chided him. The family thought Amu Mansour was crazy to leave, but he didn’t believe the paradise we were living in would endure. Amu Mansour warned us that the Jews in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had been forced to leave with nothing but the shirts on their backs. He said we should leave while we could. But my father told him, ‘Persians are different, they aren’t Arabs, we are safe here and we are prospering in ways no other generation could have imagined.’ My father was right for another decade — but then it became clear that Amu Mansour wasn’t an alarmist, he was just smarter than the rest of our community.”

Amu Moussa took a sip of his tea and eyed me shrewdly as he continued. He wanted to make sure I was still with him. I was, although I still had no idea where this was going.

“It all happened very fast. We heard the news of unrest in different places, but Tehran was safe, metropolitan, and life was too good. And then in the span of months came the rioting — the Shah fell, and the Ayatollah took over. Soon Jews were being swept off to jail or even killed in riots or fake trials. My father died of a heart attack, but not before he called Amu Mansour to let him know that he wished he’d made it to Jerusalem.

“He was a good man and raised us well. He taught us to value family, to take care of our community.  So I was prepared to do the right thing. No one knew, but my older brother Farzin had been working with the Israeli government to smuggle in visas and fake foreign passports in order to get people out of the country. No one knew until he pulled me aside one day and told me that ‘they’ were coming for him.”

Before I had time to ask “who?” Amu Moussa had answered, “The police. They were coming to arrest Farzin. But it wasn’t an arrest like you know it; it was an arrest to throw him in jail for life. Maybe it was also to torture him to death, we weren’t sure, and I wasn’t going to find out. By that time, most Jews weren’t able to get out of Iran via the airport, even with the money for bribes and the kind of fake passports that Farzin was making with the help of the Israeli government. Many people were starting to go through the mountains into Afghanistan or Pakistan. It was a treacherous journey, but it was the only way to avoid getting drafted into the Revolutionary Guard and becoming cannon fodder for them against the Iraqis.”

Anyone with Persian cousins, as I have, had heard this story in its many sad, sometimes miraculous variations. Neither the army nor the thousand-mile hike across the border was a good option.

“We began packing his bags and I promised I would try to meet him in Europe as soon as I could. And at the very moment that we finished filling his backpack with clothes and enough jewelry to bribe his way into Pakistan, the police began banging at the door. We both knew he couldn’t outrun them, but Hashem gave me an idea. I hugged my brother before I shut the door and went to speak with the police. As calmly as anything I’ve ever said, I told them, ‘I am Farzin Chacham-Tzedek. I am the one you want, the one who forged the documents. Leave my family alone. My father has just passed away and it is too much for my mother. Take me and leave my family alone.’ ”

“You are a brave man, Amu Moussa.” I was truly in awe of his courage, but he waved away the compliment as if he were swatting a fly. Apparently, this was only a small part of a larger picture. Perhaps, I began to wonder, there’s a reason he didn’t see himself as a hero.

“Maybe. Or maybe I was just ignorant of how angry they’d be when they found out I was lying,” he chuckled. “I was imprisoned and sent to a military jail outside of Tehran. It didn’t take them long to learn that I was not the person they’d been looking for, but they didn’t really care to let me leave. I’d endured enough beatings and torture to get answers out of a normal spy and they soon realized that I had only lied to let my big brother escape — and that I didn’t have any information for them. Some of the interrogators actually found it noble, but those who didn’t left me with broken fingers and enough blows to my head that my right ear still doesn’t hear too well. I spent 30 months washing dishes 22 hours a day at that cursed building, until they eventually let me out to use me as bait to find my brother. They’d taken my passport and put me on probation. They figured he’d eventually come out of hiding and then they’d have him.

“But my brother Farzin was long gone, and I would only find out later that he was working for the Israeli military as a translator, monitoring the Persian army’s communications. But somehow he managed to leave a message for me with a cousin: ‘Pack your bag for the mountains and take as many boys as you can with you.’ And, so, a young man of 24, I suddenly found myself in charge of a dozen boys, each of them not much past their bar mitzvahs, headed in a truck filled with chickens from Tehran to Kerman, from where we’d start walking.

“We only had one pair of tefillin and we didn’t even have a tallit gadol. Can you imagine, Dr. Freedman? One pair of tefillin for us all to share, brought along by a boy named David. They’d belonged to his uncle, who was killed in a pogrom months earlier when the mob murdered dozens of Jewish men at a beit knesset in Tehran. David shared his tefillin with us all as we rode in trucks filled with livestock and chickens, traveling until there were no more roads.”

Amu Moussa’s tears began to fall again as he spoke about the tefillin.

Mrs. Chacham-Tzedek entered the room to refill our cups of tea for the third time, looking at her husband questioningly as she noticed his wet cheeks. But she also knew from years of discretion that this wasn’t her conversation, as she delicately left the room.

“I am telling you my story because I am afraid it will be lost,” Amu Moussa said, wiping his eyes. “I’ve watched two generations of my family grow up and have yet to tell them about it.”

I nodded respectfully and let him continue. Obviously there were more layers here, consuming him with guilt and shame. What was his secret?

To be continued…

Identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients, their families, and all other parties.

Jacob L. Freedman is a psychiatrist and business consultant based in Israel. When he’s not busy with his patients, Dr. Freedman, whose new book Off the Couch has just been released in collaboration with Menucha Publishers, can be found learning Torah in the Old City or hiking the hills around Jerusalem. Dr. Freedman can be reached most easily through his website www.drjacoblfreedman.com.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 897)