Relatives from Rasht, dispersed by the revolution and separated by deaths, have finally gotten back in contact with one another.
David Rashti, who lives in the Los Angeles area, and Rachel Levy, who lives in Isarel, are first cousins. Rashti’s late father, Atta, and Levy’s aged mother, Iran, were two of six siblings.
But the siblings had long been separated, dating to Iran’s decision around 1949 to remain in Israel while the other five, who had also moved to Israel in 1948, returned to their homeland.
After the revolution, they relocated again, to the United States. The Jewish Telegraph Agency told the story of their dispersal and reunion.
Several of the siblings—three brothers and three sisters—had worked in Rasht in the family’s fabric businesses before they moved to Israel and lived in a tent camp with their parents, Eliyahu and Miriam. But Israel didn’t turn out to be appealing to most of them. They missed home.
After all but Iran returned to Iran within a year, they stayed connected for some three decades, until the revolution in 1979 disrupted the family.
Little by little, the family members clandestinely left Iran, forsaking homes and businesses and withdrawing whatever money they could. Levy heard that some of her aunts and uncles paid smugglers to convey them and their families by donkey over Iran’s western border to Turkey.
Upon eventually reaching America, the eldest, Suleiman, settled in New York. So did his brother, Haviv, and sister, Mahin Ebrani. Another sister, Shamsi Yashar, went to Boston. Rashti’s father, Atta, headed to Los Angeles.
The past six-plus decades have seen only occasional in-person contacts. Suleiman visited Israel to see Iran and her family; he has since passed away. Levy also recalls sitting with her parents in their yard in the Beit Yisrael section of Jerusalem when a bearded man walked back and forth on the sidewalk before them.
Iran asked for whom he was looking.
“Do you recognize me?” the man asked.
She did not.
“I am Atta,” he told his sister.
Levy vividly recalls the scene.
“We looked on, amazed. It was like Joseph [in the Bible] revealing himself to his brothers” after being gone for many years.
Only two other visits among family members were held: Levy’s brother, Shimon Shimoni, traveled to America two decades ago and went to each of the three cities where his aunts, uncles and cousins lived, and Levy’s Aunt Mahin traveled to Israel and stayed with her. With time, the connections weakened.
About seven years ago, Iran asked her daughter to find her siblings and their children, whose contact information she had apparently lost. Levy, 57, a religiously observant mother of 10 and grandmother of 18, does not own a computer and acknowledges that she is unaware of the Internet’s capabilities for finding people.
In August, she broadcast an appeal on the Israeli radio program “Hamador L’chipus Krovim (Searching for Relatives Bureau). An Israeli listener located Rashti, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino. To reach him, Levy first had to upgrade her telephone service plan, which had not allowed for international calls.
“Aunt Iran—the missing sister!” Rashti exclaimed upon realizing who the caller was.
Levy immediately invited Rashti, a developer of medical products, for a visit to Israel to see her and her 87-year-old mother living with her.
