The following was written by Narciss Sohrabi, a researcher in urban studies focusing on Tehran’s Jewish communal spaces and their relationship to urban context, memory, and everyday life in Iran. She is affiliated with the Centre for Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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On the morning of April 7, 2026, I woke up to a phone call from Tehran. It was a friend of mine, a member of the Association of Jewish Iranian Graduates. Her voice was marked by shock and disbelief: Rafi-Nia Synagogue had been destroyed by an Israeli missile strike. I was stunned. How could a small, modest, almost invisible building tucked away in a dead-end alley in central Tehran be hit by an Israeli bomb?
I thought back to my first experience at this neighborhood synagogue during Yom Kippur a few years ago: the quiet entrance of men wearing kippot, women offering brief, hushed greetings, and the beginning of rhythmic prayers on this day of collective mourning. Voices rose in unison as they recited the Shema and the Kaddish, holy Jewish chants, and then gently subsided. Children moved along the temple’s margins. The synagogue was a home for families as much as a space for rituals.
My friend’s voice brought me back to the present: “It was around three in the morning. There was an explosion. Neighbors called and said the synagogue had been hit.”
Just the night before the attack, Rafi-Nia had hosted a Passover celebration. The morning after, the community had gathered again, my friend told me, this time to survey the synagogue’s rubble.
In such moments, news moves in fragmented narratives before it stabilizes.
But the experience of loss begins even before official confirmation. One thing was evident: the Rafi-Nia Synagogue was no longer what it once had been. Israel had destroyed a religious and social space for Iran’s Jewish community.
Tehran’s Jewish Geography
The Rafi-Nia Synagogue formed part of the wider landscape of Iran’s Jewish community, which today numbers between 10-15,000 people, according to the Iranian Jewish community association.
Over many years of fieldwork, interviews, and visits across Tehran and other cities, I have met numerous members of the community, from male factory owners, businesspeople, and lawyers to women who served as nurses during the Iran–Iraq war or pursued careers in law, sports, and commerce. I have witnessed a community navigating change while maintaining continuity, and have always received a warm welcome throughout my research.
Tehran has 26 synagogues, of which 13 are active today. Many synagogues are in older Jewish neighborhoods such as Oudlajan, the “mehelle” which was the center of Tehran’s Jewish life in the 19th century. In recent years, there has been a movement to restore older synagogues and open them up to non-Jewish visitors.
This includes the national heritage site of the Ezra Yaghoub Synagogue in Oudlajan. Funding comes from Jewish community members both inside Iran and abroad. In this same neighborhood is the Dr. Sapir Hospital, a Jewish community hospital, which continues to serve central and southern Tehran’s population even as the Jewish community has mostly moved uptown.
These shifts reflect broader social and urban transformations. Over the years, as Tehran expanded northward, many families gradually moved from Jewish Oudlajan toward major streets with mixed populations, including Si-Tir, Sheikh-Hadi, and Gorgan, and beyond. Some community members describe this as a “migration from the neighborhood to the street.” Jewish institutions were previously concentrated in a single neighborhood, but they spread across Tehran from west to east and north during the Pahlavi period.
But the community held onto their old spaces even as they moved elsewhere. Today, no Jewish families reside permanently in Oudlajan, yet three synagogues remain active.
Once, while visiting Hadash Synagogue with a friend, I observed a small group of about ten men gathered for Shabbat prayers. They attended weekly simply to keep the synagogue’s lights on by ensuring a minyan. After prayers, we shared a simple Shabbat meal of eggs, potatoes, and wine.
These intimate moments reveal the continuity of tradition, even when the broader community has largely dispersed across the city and the world.
These spaces retain shared characteristics: inward orientation, small scale, and integration into the urban fabric. Unlike many religious buildings that function as urban landmarks in Iran, such as major mosques and churches, synagogues are often embedded within residential neighborhoods. They are less seen than “recognized,” existing within networks of social relations and familiarity.
This “invisibility” is a defining feature of many synagogues in Iran. Yet it did not protect Rafi-Nia from Israeli missiles.
Fragments of a Shared History
The Rafi-Nia synagogue was located in a narrow cul-de-sac in a busy neighborhood of central Tehran, not far from the University of Tehran. The alley was so tight that two cars could barely pass each other. From the outside, nothing distinguished the building from its surroundings: a south-facing structure without any overt religious markers. It was fully absorbed into the fabric of a residential neighborhood home to many Jews.
The synagogue likely dates back to the mid-20th century, the early Pahlavi period. Its sloped roof and wooden beams preserved traces of older construction techniques. Its religious function began in 1958, when the late Abdul Rahman Rafi-Nia made it available to the Jewish community. Rafi-Nia was from Mashhad, and it became known among locals as the “Khorasani synagogue.” In the decades that followed, the synagogue became a stable center for Tehran’s wider Jewish community. Tehran’s Jewish community, like Tehranis more generally, traces from across the country, especially Isfahan, Shiraz, Kashan, Yazd, and Mashhad.
In recent years, Rafi-Nia expanded beyond its role as a synagogue. It became a gathering place for the Association of Jewish Iranian Graduates, hosting meetings on psychology, sociology, and individual creativity for aspiring professionals from the community. On the ground floor, a small kosher and vegetarian restaurant operated, serving local favorites like pizza, falafel, and sandwiches. Rafi-Nia was not merely a religious site; it was a layered environment where worship, sociality, and everyday life were intertwined.
Rafi-Nia’s interior was simple yet deeply meaningful. Rows of chairs faced the Ark of the Covenant (Aron Ha Kodesh), where Torah scrolls were kept behind a curtain. It was portions of these scrolls that were found in the rubble.
The walls were adorned with Hebrew texts, framed prayers, and ritual symbols. Light entered softly through small windows, creating a calm, low-intensity atmosphere. This was not a monumental or representational structure, but a lived space, one whose identity was shaped less by architecture than by use.
Even the simplest objects carried memory. The chairs, for instance, were donated before the Iranian Revolution by Habib Elghanian, a businessman and patron who was executed in 1979 amid accusations of spying for Israel. They were part of a living assemblage of objects, each bearing fragments of a shared and ever-evolving history.
One of the defining features of this synagogue was the link between ritual and collective participation. In ceremonies such as Yom Kippur, ritual roles were assigned through a form of communal auction that included opening the curtain of the Torah and participating in specific parts of the service.
Even objects within the synagogue were symbolically included in this participatory process. This mechanism was not merely economic; it functioned as a collective investment in maintaining and sustaining the space. Amounts were often determined in multiples of 13, a number with symbolic significance in Jewish tradition.
Synagogues are not simply places of worship; they are networks of relationships, repetitions, memories, and human presence. Damage to them signifies the disruption of a way of life, a way of being in the city.
‘The Bricks of My Soul’
April 7 was the last day before a ceasefire went into effect after 40 days of joint Israeli-US bombing that claimed more than 3,000 lives across Iran. It was also the morning that Rafi-Nia was destroyed.
Today, rubble litters the spot where the synagogue once stood. Pieces of the Torah, ripped and burnt in the attack, were found among remains of concrete walls and wooden chairs.
Israel and the United States have caused widespread damage to infrastructure and historical sites across Iran, including the Falak-ol-Aflak Castle in Khorramabad, Chehel Sotoun in Isfahan, and Golestan Palace in Tehran.
The targeting of a Jewish synagogue by Israel is not just a military strike; it reveals a profound historical and human paradox. The war between Israel, the United States and Iran is not merely a geopolitical event for Iranian Jews; it is a deeply personal, emotional, and familial experience.
Many Iranian Jews have family members and friends in Israel. In times of war, these connections are disrupted: communications are cut, contact becomes limited, and family reunions are postponed. And, in the case of the Rafi-Nia Synagogue, their holy site was destroyed by a state that claims to be their defender. In the process, it has become a testament to the history of Iran and its Jewish community.
But that history is still being written. In conversations with two members of the community, I learned that there are plans to rebuild it after the war. In a telephone interview, one of them invoked a verse by the poet Simin Behbahani:
دوباره میسازمت وطن
اگر چه با خشت جان خویش
I will rebuild you, my homeland, even if with the bricks of my own soul.
References
Sohrabi, N. M. (2023). Tehran synagogues: the socio-cultural topographies and architectural typologies. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 22(1), 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2021.1971934
Sohrabi, N. M. (2024). The politics of in/visibility: The Jews of urban Tehran. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 53(1), 74–92.
Sohrabi, N. M. (2026). Critical Jewish heritage and memory in Tehran: funerary spaces, aesthetics, and preservation. Middle Eastern Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2026.2629505
Sternfeld, L. B. (2019). Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-century Iran. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Digital / Online Sources
Sassooni, T. (2023, December 10). Saffron and Shabbat: Stories of Iranian Jewish Cooking in Diaspora. https://ajammc.com/2023/12/10/iranian-jewish-cookbook-diaspora/
