400 at Rally Demand Freedom for Iranian Jews in Spy Case

The charges were trumped up, the two televised confessions were coerced, the so-called trial was a sham and the convictions a travesty, speakers at a rally demanding the release of 10 Iranian Jews convicted of spying for Israel told the men’s supporters Monday.

“For each and every one of us who are Jews, we are not allowed to turn our backs on those in prison,” Rabbi Harvey Fields of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple said. “We know what show trials are about.”

Monday’s rally at the Hollywood Temple Beth El was organized by the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Iranian American Jewish Federation.

It attracted about 400 people and was one of more than a dozen such rallies in cities around the world--London, Moscow, Paris, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver among them.

“What we have learned as Jews across the ages is not to be silent in the face of evil,” Fields told those at the Los Angeles rally, emphasizing that Jews cannot be silent now about the convictions in Iran.

The only crime committed by the men was that they were Jews, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said at the rally.

“Why are we here tonight?” he asked the crowd. “First, none of us can afford to stand idly by when any human being is unjustly persecuted. We are here because we believe that anybody who persecutes us, one way or another, will have to pay a price.”

Yaroslavsky reminded the crowd of his days as a leader in local efforts to save Soviet Jewry and how doubters questioned whether Soviet leaders were even listening. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he said, memoirs by former officials have made it clear that they were listening and that they felt the pressure.

“That’s why it’s important for us to be here tonight,” he said, “to make sure that the government of Iran knows that if they are going to pick on our people, there is a price to be paid.”

The Iranian Jewish population of Los Angeles is 35,000--about the same as the number of Jews remaining in Iran. Several of the convicted men have relatives here.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center said the Iranian government now has asked the international police agency Interpol to, in Cooper’s words, “track down and arrest Yitzchak Baal-Haness, a beautiful elderly rabbi on Pico Boulevard.”

“His crime?” Cooper asked. He knows the men arrested in Iran and accused of spying. Baal-Haness certainly knows them, Cooper said. He performed their bar mitzvahs. But the rabbi, who Cooper said is nearly 80, is not the mastermind of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad that the Iranian government makes him out to be.

“If this were not so tragic,” Cooper said, “it would be pathetic.”

The convictions July 1 have put Iran’s judicial system under scrutiny and strained Iran’s relations with the West. The 10 Jews found guilty of taking part in a spy ring for Israel were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to 13 years. Two Muslims were convicted of abetting the group.

The long sentences meted out at the end of a closed-door trial drew immediate condemnations and protests from President Clinton, Israel, the European Union and Jewish groups around the world.

Three of the 13 Jews who went on trial in April were acquitted. Two of the four Muslims accused as accessories in the case also were found not guilty.

Since the arrest of the Jews in Shiraz, about 420 miles south of Tehran, became public in early 1999, Israel has vociferously denied that any of the accused had been funneling information to its intelligence services.

At Monday’s rally in Los Angeles, former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate, said the government of Iran must be sent a message that “there is no hope--no hope--for normalizing relations with Iran until these prisoners are freed.”

Quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Villaraigosa said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Rally organizers passed out petitions to be sent to Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammad Khatami.

The petition notes that the convictions are on appeal and urged that the 10 men be released.

“It is clear that there is no substance to the charges against them,” the petition says. “It is long overdue that the suffering of the defendants, their families and the entire Jewish community in Iran be ended.”