Web Site Allows Iranian Jews to Mourn

Shahram Farzan poses in his Los Angeles office Dec. 20, 2006, with his website displaying photographs from a Jewish cemetery in Tehran. An Iranian cultural taboo that death and youth should be kept apart prevented Susan Manavi from ever visiting her grandparents' gravesite. But the Internet has allowed her to see her grandparents' headstones for the first time. (AP Photo/Nick Ut) (Nick Ut - AP)

LOS ANGELES -- As a young woman in Tehran during the 1970s, Susan Manavi never visited a cemetery, even after her grandparents were laid to rest a couple of years before Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Although they were buried in a Jewish cemetery near the city, Manavi's parents adhered to an Iranian cultural taboo that death and youth should be kept apart, so as not to tempt fate.

The 52-year-old Los Angeles woman first laid eyes on her grandparents' headstones two months ago on the Web site Beheshtieh.com. The site has photographs of thousands of graves from Beheshtieh Cemetery.

"Looking at those graves took me back to our homeland and all the memories, sweet and bitter," Manavi said. "The sweetness of everybody living side by side, rather harmoniously, and the bitterness of leaving and not knowing if you will ever be back."

The site was developed by L.A. resident Shahram Avraham Farzan. He has cataloged the final resting place for generations of Tehran's Jewish people.

Indexed alphabetically, the site provides an opportunity for e-mourning at a time when many Jews throughout the world feel antagonized by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The hardline conservative has repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel, and most recently sponsored a conference denying the existence of the Holocaust.

Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Los Angeles-based Iranian American Jewish Federation, said the Web site has stirred a lot of excitement because, "there are many in our community who, for various reasons, feel limited when it comes to going back to Iran.

"They fear hostility but they still feel a closeness to that land and that people and their shared history," he said.

For a community in exile, seeing the graveyard is a rare, meaningful way of connecting with the past, said Roya Hakakian, author of "Journey to the Land of No," a memoir of growing up as an Iranian Jew.

"I think in an ironic way this Web site makes you feel like you have not left your dead behind," Hakakian said. When "you are able to reach back to your dead, then there's a sense of being alive and not having entirely vanished."

The admittedly morbid undertaking was somewhat accidental for Farzan, who returned to Iran in 2002 to place a marker on his father's grave.

Nearby, he saw the grave of a family friend and decided to snap a photo for the friend's relatives. In other parts of the cemetery, he saw poorly maintained graves, and others being moved for construction.

Farzan continued to take photos for the next 10 weeks, covering about 70 percent of the graveyard and spending thousands of dollars before returning to the United States.