Life during the Iran war in Great Neck, one the largest hubs of Iranian Americans

To its Iranian Jewish residents, Great Neck feels a lot like home.

The peninsula is a cradle to thousands of members of the diaspora, who shop in kosher grocery stores and attend Shabbat services where Farsi is spoken. Neighborhoods are quiet; trees abound on street corners and in sprawling parks. Boutique shops line walkable streets, and concerts carry the sounds of the homeland.

“There’s no major cultural shock,” said Elsa Barkhordarian, a local therapist who left Iran in 1996. “It’s beautiful, green and homey.”

But since the start of the Iran war, Sean Sabeti, a lawyer living in Russell Gardens, said things have changed. Concerts and other public events that normally brought the community together have dwindled.

"The people getting killed in Iran," he said, is not "cause for celebration."

The United States and Israel first attacked Iran in February, and the fighting has continued months later despite assurances from President Donald Trump that the conflict would be short-lived.

An estimated 9,000 to 18,000 people have been killed in the conflict, according to militaryspend.org, an independent military publication that has tracked death totals. More than 20 U.S. soldiers have been killed, per the Pentagon, and warnings by Iran continue over commercial vessels passing through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Trump said last week he would not order any further strikes on Iran before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. 

In the months since the war began, the mood has shifted in the peninsula that has been a hub for Persian Jews in the United States for decades, dating back to the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979.

In restaurants and in grocery stores, synagogues and office buildings, discussion of the conflict overseas has dominated life. The mood was buoyant at first, with hope that the Islamic theocratic government could be toppled. But that optimism has given way to resignation in recent months as the conflict has dragged on.

The discourse among residents is girded in two competing emotions: gratitude for their adopted home, but despair for the violence in their homeland.

"You can't be in peace," Great Neck Mayor Pedram Bral said, "when the country you love is constantly under threat."

'Our community is thriving'

 

The peninsula has one of the largest concentrations of Iranian Jews in the country, along with Los Angeles. 

There are 1,794 residents in the Village of Great Neck who claim Iranian ancestry, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey, and 1,711 in neighboring Kings Point Village. At least a thousand more live in villages scattered around the peninsula.

Persian Jews hold political office across the peninsula, including Bral, Kings Point Mayor Shahriar Victory, Saddle Rock Mayor Kambiz Akhavan and several members of the Great Neck Park District and Great Neck Library Board. Conservative and Orthodox synagogues fill up with congregants during Shabbat.

Persians are "proud Great Neckers," Bral said.

"They love living here, with all the services we have, from parks to schools to temples to the community itself," he said. 

Bobby Bakhchi, an executive board member of the Sephardic Heritage Alliance, a Great Neck-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving Sephardic and Persian culture, moved to the United States in 1979 during the revolution. 

He said he feels “grateful” to live in Great Neck during this time — especially after growing up in Cold Spring Harbor, where the Persian Jewish population is much smaller.

"Many of our family members, many of our parents, had to get up, sell everything and leave," Bakhchi said. "At the time, it was probably really traumatic, and really scary, but now our community is thriving."

When the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, older Persian Jews hoped a regime change meant they could visit the country one last time; younger ones were eager to see it for the first time.

“The first weeks, there was a lot of excitement, and wherever we went, people were talking about it,” said Raymond Iryami, an attorney and longtime Great Neck resident born in Iran.

His wife, Ania, also an Iran native, added, “We would cry about it.”

But that hope, they say, has faded. 

Absence felt

One longtime member of the community has been missing for more than a year.

Kamran Hekmati and his family left Iran in 1977, two years before the Islamic Revolution, as the national attitude toward Jewish people started to shift. He first landed in Brooklyn before settling in Great Neck in 1996.

He spent the next several decades working to increase the visibility and influence of Persian Jews on the peninsula. Hekmati became president of the Persian Cultural Committee, organizing concerts featuring Persian musicians at Steppingstone Park in Kings Point and holiday celebrations at the Great Neck Library.

Hekmati flew to Iran last year to visit family and friends, but he was barred from leaving by authorities and jailed in the infamous Evin prison. The detention center is notorious for its oppressive conditions, human rights advocates have said, and is where political prisoners and dissidents have been imprisoned. 

While he was freed from prison in September, according to the U.S. State Department, he remains under an exit ban in Iran.

“He’s another victim,” Iryami said, “of the revolution that happened 47 years ago.”

Hekmati, a jeweler and a member of Great Neck Estates' zoning board, has become a symbol of the struggle his neighbors thought they had left behind.

Family members say he was charged under an Iranian law that prohibits visits to Israel within the past 10 years; but Hekmati’s last visit was 13 years ago for his son’s bar mitzvah, they maintain, before the law was passed.

In Hekmati, Iryami and others see another chapter of a heartbreaking story with no end. When he was a kid, Iryami recalled, he did not see his father — who had stayed behind longer in Iran — for five years. 

“I ran toward him and gave him the biggest hug at the airport,” Iryami said. “I hope [Hekmati] and his family have a similar reunion very soon.”

Sabeti, 64, grew up in Iran before moving to the peninsula, where he helped Hekmati book Persian musical acts for the concerts in Great Neck. 

He now works with clients in Iran looking to legally immigrate to the United States.

"I have a deep feeling for the country," Sabeti said. "But I want the country to be free and democratic."

'We are an exiled community'

Lior Sternfeld, associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Penn State University, said the first Persian Jews, from the city of Mashhad, started settling in New York in the 1950s and ’60s, first in Queens. 

By the 1970s, community members had started moving east to Great Neck, which already had a sizable Ashkenazi Jewish population. There was also "enough available and underdeveloped space to offer opportunities not simply for individual families to buy homes, but for a community to expand and eventually build its own institutions," Sternfeld said.

"After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when much larger numbers of Iranian Jews left Iran, migrants tended to gravitate toward places where Iranian and Iranian Jewish networks already existed," he said. 

The Persian Jews in Great Neck fall into two camps: Those whose ancestry traces back to Tehran and those from Mashhad, a smaller Iranian city where Jews practiced in secret after outwardly converting to Islam, Sternfeld said. Most don’t have many family members left in Iran; there are approximately 15,000 Jews in the country of about 93 million, according to Sternfeld, author of “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran."

It is that shared generational trauma of the revolution that binds the modern community together, said Rebecca Sassouni, an attorney who lives in Great Neck and was the first Persian American elected to the Great Neck Board of Education. Sassouni, whose family emigrated from Iran to the United States before she was born, classified the group as a “minority within a minority.”

“We are an exiled community,” Sassouni said in an interview at Bagel Mentch, a popular kosher restaurant in the village. “For as much one can take comfort, we are extremely aware, I am extremely aware, that ... makes it unusual, special and fragile.”

Dancing without fear

Tucked off the living room in Iryami’s home is a small room that functions as a tribute to his homeland.

It is filled with Iranian accoutrements: musical instruments, such as a ney and a kamancheh; a custom couch made with designs inspired by an Iranian artist; and a rug from Iryami’s grandmother’s home he estimates is more than a century old. He regularly hosts a poetry group in the room for fellow expats.

“I left Iran 44 years ago. There’s still a little tiny hole. And it rears itself every once in a while,” he said. The room, he noted, provides a “soothing, calming effect.”

Barkhordarian runs a support group for Iranian students at Stony Brook University, none of whom are Jewish. 

Danial Bazmandeh, 26, a student working toward a doctorate in computer science, said the group has helped him process the complicated emotions he has about what's happening in Iran. He left his home country three years ago.

Bazmandeh lives in Coram but makes regular hourlong drives to Great Neck to shop at Shop Delight, a kosher grocery store with several Persian food items, such as Sagnek and Barbari bread.

"It's nice to have a place like this," he said. "I wish it was closer. I'd go more often. I'd go every week."

Barkhordarian dreams of bringing her son, who is 4, to Iran — though she knows that day might never come. So she finds ways to integrate Iranian culture into his life. He loves Ghormeh sabzi, a native stew made of beef, beans and spices, and Barkhordarian always keeps some in the fridge.

And when she gets back from work, she kicks off her shoes and finds her son. She blasts music by Sasy, a provocative Persian rapper and pop singer who often clashes with the Iranian regime. 

In their Great Neck home, there is no need to hide. The windows are open, the shades drawn up. Together, mother and son dance to the sounds of the homeland.

Newsday's Caroline Curtin contributed research to this story.