A guest post by Narciss M. 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.”
The scene at Rafi-Nia following the bombing. (Photo: Marjan Yashayaei)
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.
read the rest: https://ajammc.com/2026/05/03/tehran-synagogue-destroyed-rafinia/
