Religion, Politics Put Aside to Aid a Fellow Iranian

To Jews, it’s a mitzvah, or commandment, to extend a helping hand to someone less fortunate.

To the jailed Muslim who recently grasped that hand, it was a ness, or miracle.

For the paths of Pooya Dayanim and Dariush Farshidian were not ones likely to cross.

Dayanim is a prominent Jewish Iranian, executive director of a two-decade-old philanthropic group based in Los Angeles and a vocal opponent of the Muslim clerics governing his homeland. He is eloquent and outgoing.

Farshidian is shy, an Iranian immigrant with limited English in Orange County, a nonpracticing Muslim and Islamic Republic Air Force veteran whom the Immigration and Naturalization Service wants to deport to his native Iran. An electronics technician, he is largely unknown, even in the Iranian community.

Then, on April 28, Dayanim got a letter.

It was a photocopy, wedged in the daily stack of mail he pores over each afternoon. Farshidian had sent it and hundreds more like it to listings in the local Persian yellow pages. It was a plea for help.

“I had to run away from Iran because of my political opinions, which is a form of treason,” Farshidian wrote.

The author was desperate, weary of four years in INS detention both on Terminal Island and in Bakersfield. He was lonely, and he needed $5,000 to post bond so he could wage a final legal battle to stay in the United States.

Non-Iranian aid groups had turned him away. They suggested he seek help from his own people. Non-Iranian clerics offered prayer but little else.

The cursive Persian script in his letter conveyed Farshidian’s anger at U.S. treatment of INS detainees and his fear of imprisonment, if not execution, by Iranian officials because he deserted the military during the country’s eight-year war with Iraq.

He pleaded in the name of God, asking for help from a Jewish group at a time when Muslim-Jewish dialogue in Los Angeles was breaking off over Israeli behavior in the Middle East.

“The letter was so genuine,” Dayanim said. “I thought about it the whole night.”

Here was a chance for one Iranian to reach out to another Iranian--religion and politics aside. So Dayanim decided to do something that expatriate Iranians don’t often do: Unite.

“I thought it was important especially because relations between Iranian Jews and non-Jewish Iranians were tense because of our emphatic support of Jews in Iran,” Dayanim said, referring to candlelight protests and political pressure the Los Angeles Jewish community had waged on behalf of 13 Jews jailed in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz on questionable charges of spying.

Dayanim called the Persian-language daily Sobhe Iran (“Iran Morning”), whose editor had also received the Farshidian letter. “I asked him, “Why don’t we do something good together?’ ”

The editor, Cyrus Sharafshahee, who has sometimes rankled Iranian Jews in Los Angeles because of his pro-Palestinian slant, agreed to help publicize Farshidian’s plight and seek help.

Still, there remained the issue of credibility. Dayanim didn’t want the Iranian American Jewish Assn., or Siamak, to throw its weight behind someone undeserving. And phone conversations with the 48-year-old immigrant and a background check revealed Farshidian was no innocent.

Farshidian, who came to the United States in 1987, had spent time in a U.S. jail several years before his INS detention. He had pleaded guilty to a felony of falsely imprisoning his son, a charge Farshidian said arose from a dispute with his estranged wife.

In Iran, it is generally men who get custody of the children when parents split, a cultural and legal difference that led to the misunderstanding, as Farshidian describes it.

Dayanim was convinced. Farshidian had paid his debt to society, and it was no excuse for the INS to keep him detained for years, Dayanim said.

Several members of the Iranian Jewish community quickly rallied to Farshidian’s aid. David Tabari, a landlord and businessman specializing in clothing, and several of his friends produced the bond money, and Tabari posted Farshidian’s bond on May 4.

Unfortunately, posting the bond took six hours longer than raising it did, Tabari recalled, smiling. “I was waiting in a long line, worried I wouldn’t be home by the Sabbath,” he said.

After Farshidian was released from Terminal Island, another $1,000 was collected from Jewish and Muslim Iranians to help Farshidian get back on his feet.

But the lengthy detention, Farshidian and INS officials agree, was partly his own doing. Farshidian, afraid for his life, refused to cooperate with deportation efforts and was detained.

The INS case is not related to the earlier conviction, said agency spokeswoman Sharon Gavin. Farshidian has been turned down for asylum but is appealing.

He used the donations to pay for a motel room in Costa Mesa, which remains his home as he looks for a job. He once owned a three-bedroom house there and a 1996 Mazda Miata, but they and his other possessions were repossessed during his four years in INS detention.

Now, as he looks for a job, Farshidian also dreams of starting his own philanthropic group to reach out to less fortunate Iranians here. “I’d like to thank all those people who helped me and gave me a chance to live my life again,” he said.

As for Dayanim, he’s pleased. “There’s a Jewish saying: To save a captive is the highest mitzvah, the highest good I can do.”