Dark nights, winding roads, hired smugglers. * The escape of a Jewish woman from darkness to light. * A personal Chanuka story.
“It sounds like the beginning of a typical Chanuka story,” begins C., with a twinkle in her eyes, “but the continuation is anything but typical, I promise you.”
***
It was a cold, rainy night and we were crowded around the large menorah. My father sang in Persian, while my mother and I, wrapped in dark, festive chadors, served refreshments of white sweet cakes naan berenji, and wide cups of hot, Persian tea.
“You are still here,” said my mother to me as she smiled sadly. “Do you remember how we blessed you last year that this year, you should light the menorah in Eretz Yisroel? With Miriam?” (My sister had made aliya a decade before).
“And two years ago?” I commented with the same sort of smile. “And three … Maybe next year, G-d willing.”
***
Tehran, 1986. Khomeini’s police ruled with an iron fist. Harsh laws encompassed all of life and did not allow for independent thinking.
Girls had to cover their heads from the age of three. A woman caught without a veil was taken to the police station where she was cruelly beaten. A woman seen wearing nail polish had to wash and prepare three corpses for burial.
The “Hezbolites” (members of an extreme fundamentalist cadre) would fabricate files on innocent people, and executions were daily occurrences in Iran in those years.
My older brother ran a large pharmacy. The sister of one of his employees worked as a teacher in a village. When she came to visit her brother, she was thrown in jail. Two days later she was taken out to be executed for the crime of teaching in a co-ed school.
At this point, I am always asked: “Surely, you were unable to be religious,” or “You had to hide the fact that you were Jews, didn’t you?” The answer is no. Although there was, and still is, anti-Semitism, it had nothing to do with keeping Torah and mitzvos, or at least not where I lived.
My parents’ home was very religious. My mother regularly studied Chumash and Rashi and did not allow us to eat anything not prepared at home, not even by others who kept kosher.
My father and brothers were intellectuals who studied medicine and then specialized in pharmaceuticals, in which some of them are successful till this day. I studied to be a secretary and had a good job in a big office. Under the Khomeini regime, all Jewish employees were fired and I was told that my appearance was not in accordance with the spirit of the place. I tried to find another job but doors were slammed in my face. My employers had done a good job…
I was already thirty years old and still unmarried, which led us to conclude that the best thing for me would be to make aliya. We tried for three years to get me a visa. When I had already given up, my older brother decided to take matters into his own hands. On a short, pressured Friday at the end of Cheshvan, he took me away from the frantic cooking in the kitchen and said, “Farida, you’re leaving. Now! It’s the only way.”
He had managed to get me included in a group of Jewish boys, seventeen and older, who did not want to be drafted into the Iranian army and had hired the services of professional smugglers.
I hastily parted from my family. My brother paid the smuggler and entrusted him with a large sum of money that I had saved up for an apartment in Eretz Yisroel. I was given a little suitcase with a few items of clothing and valuable jewelry.
We set out. We arrived in a small village close to Shabbos where a Jewish family hosted us. The boys ate and sang Shabbos z’miros, but I couldn’t eat a thing.
At midnight, two jeeps screeched to a halt near the little house and armed smugglers with their faces concealed urged us to get in. The jeeps raced off until we arrived at another village home. On the roof and near it stood armed guards.
We stayed there until Motzaei Shabbos. The boys, as I called them, ate and chatted and later dozed off, while I just sat there like a stone and waited for all this to end.
After Shabbos, the guides returned with Iranian village clothes for us. I, the only woman, was given long pants with a long, dark dress to wear over them and a black chador, and underneath, for good measure, a black scarf.
From that point on, we found ourselves in a desert climate, which meant that during the day I would sweat and feel choked in the thick, heavy clothing, and at night I froze.
We got back into the jeeps and they drove furiously into the desert. The road wound amidst the mountains and abysses and at 6:30 in the evening, the guides said that now we would continue on foot. There were winding roads high in the mountains and the path was dark and menacing.
I clamped my teeth, strengthened my grip on my little suitcase, and walked determinedly with the group. The hours passed, the desert was shrouded in utter darkness, as it was the end of the month, and we were still walking. We were forbidden to utter a sound, so we walked silently and heard only the pounding of our frightened hearts.
Our guides pushed forward, followed by the boys and then me, with my eyes partially closed. Around eleven o’clock at night, I heard steps behind me and a heavy hand took my arm. “Who are you?” I whispered as I jumped in fright.
“I heard that there is a woman in the group and I came to help you, so you don’t fall.”
He took my suitcase in one hand and held my arm with his other hand. The man spoke while I was focused on the path – how to pick up my feet and where to put them down, and the rocks that could slide down with a loud noise, and the abyss over there.
At a certain point, I looked around me and was horrified to discover that we were alone. “We lost them,” said my escort with a smirk, “and now, come with me. Otherwise, I’ll hand you over.”
Today, I tremble when I recall that scene. A young, refined Jewish girl in the middle of nowhere, with a brawny Iranian who wanted to kidnap her or – and it’s not clear which is worse – hand her over to the “Hezbolites” with their reaction quite predictable.
After so many hours of walking in the freezing desert, and days during which I hadn’t eaten or slept, I couldn’t even be scared. I felt as though my mind had frozen and stopped working. I sat down on the hard ground and with the small bit of sanity I had left, I raised my hands heavenward and said, “Either You send someone to help me or may the earth swallow me like Korach.”
The man stood there and described the jail in hair-raising terms and what awaited me there. “Come, let’s go,” he said again, and again I said my prayer. I ignored him.
Around one o’clock, I heard footsteps approaching once again and I froze. It was an Iranian drug smuggler who was secretly making his way just like we did. “What’s a woman doing here?” he asked, shocked. I told him.
Apparently, something touched this tough fellow and he grabbed me and somehow (I really don’t know how), I was back with my group. But without my precious suitcase. “Now you will walk next to me,” said the guide. With the last of my strength I dizzily crawled over to him.
We arrived at the border between Pakistan and Iran at seven in the morning. Four smugglers with big jeeps were waiting for us and rubbed their eyes in astonishment when they saw me.
“They told us that there’s a woman in the group, but we didn’t believe a woman would make it on the harsh, dangerous journey. How did you manage?”
I remained silent in my exhaustion and sat in the jeep waiting for the bribe the smugglers gave the local police to do its work so the roads would be clear for us.
We arrived at a small Pakistani village in the evening. They put us in the horses’ stable and left us there to sleep until the road would be clear and we could continue. By the way, the horses were there too.
Full of hay and the smell of manure we boarded the jeeps that took us to a nearby village where, finally, we ate fried eggs. We drank and slept, sitting tightly squeezed on the floor of a large room that was full of groups of people who had been smuggled from Iran one way or another.
Four days later, they packed us into a small vehicle, under the seats and hidden under thick blankets. At night, we arrived in a town close to the center of Pakistan. We were finally able to stop being afraid of our own shadow. The guides rented two rooms in a small motel (in Israel it would be called a youth hostel) and I, the only woman in the group, was given my own room. It was an incredible feeling to enter a clean room, alone, just myself, finally, without fear of who might be behind, in front of, or beside me.
It was a very cold night, but the room was heated and pleasant. It may sound funny but when I think of it, it still surprises me.
My clothes, yes, the same clothes I wore from the moment we left, cried out for a washing. They had absorbed everything, the sweat by day and the rain and mud at night, the dust of the roads and the odors of the stable and even the eggs fried for us.
Thinking that we would stay at least a day, I washed my clothes in the sink and put them near the stove to dry. At seven in the morning I was surprised when the guides knocked at the door and announced that we were going to the UN office to arrange passage to the center of Pakistan. I put on my still sopping wet clothes, and embarrassed and bewildered, I joined them.
At least at the UN office, all went well. They arranged our documents to the center of the country where we stayed at a hotel paid for by the Jewish Agency. On our first day there, I had a terrible headache and a fever. I felt awful. At night the boys took me to the “clinic,” a tent made of curtains, filthy and swarming with flies and other creatures.
The “doctor,” who was unable to communicate with me, injected me with an unidentified substance and within a short time, I felt better. I happily went to sleep but my joy was premature. When I woke up, the first thing I felt was a terrible itching all over my body that threatened to drive me crazy. My body had swelled up and my skin was red and blotchy. I had had an allergic reaction to the injection.
I lay there for three weeks, weak and dazed. Only once a day did I muster the strength to get up and cook for the boys. They bought vegetables and I cooked kosher, hot, nourishing food for them.
After three weeks, they were able to arrange our tickets to Zurich. When we arrived at the Swissair counter to buy tickets for Eretz Yisroel, each of us took out the money that the guides had given us when we parted from them which, they said, would be enough. With great anguish, I noticed that the boys were holding my checks, money I had saved up after years of work, which my brother had innocently given to the guides to hold. Of course, I didn’t say a word. The boys were certainly not at fault. But the anger and pain over the loss of the money cast a pall over my imminent arrival to Eretz Yisroel.
The money, which had been distributed in such sordid fashion amongst everyone (with the remainder among the guides), was not enough. We stood there, an odd-looking group, dressed in Iranian peasant clothes, apparently wanting to travel but without any luggage.
This sight made security suspicious and they sent a pair of policemen over to us. They looked us over and tried communicating with us in every possible language, just not Farsi. They enlisted the aid of other passengers who spoke English, French, Arabic, and Russian, until someone finally identified the Hebrew I tried to speak and contacted a member of the Jewish Agency. The Agency took care of tickets and kosher food for the flight and informed our families of our arrival.
What I mainly recall from the reception, which was a cacophony of Hebrew spoken in loud tones by overbearing people talking about the thanks they deserve (when I got over the initial excitement, I realized that this wasn’t good), women without veils, balloons and flowers and signs and excitement. My sister hugging me tightly, refusing to let go, and whispering over and over, “I knew you would arrived safely. The Rebbe promised.”
We sat down in her lovely living room in a small house in the center of the country. This was after I had taken a hot, refreshing shower, and was wearing, for the first time in my life, bright, beautiful clothing that were modest by the standards of halacha and not by the whims of some maniac or another. We sipped cups of sweet, Persian tea and wordlessly gazed upon the dancing flames of my brother-in-law’s menorah.
Then she explained. When three weeks had gone by since I had left home and there was still no sign of life from me, my worried sister contacted the Chabad house in her area where she wrote a letter to the Rebbe. The Rebbe promised that there was nothing to worry about, that I was on my way and would arrive shortly in good health. I figured out that this took place while I was lying sick and my life was in danger. I immediately decided that my next stop would be to see the Rebbe.
After I married my husband, also from Iran, who had become a baal t’shuva and an involved Chassid, I followed up on my decision. We arrived in 770 for “dollars” one Sunday, and when it was my turn, I lowered my eyes, blinded by the gaze of the Rebbe. The Rebbe asked me what my Persian name meant and when I replied in a trembling voice he told me to change it to a Hebrew name. Since then, whenever I am called by my Hebrew name, I am fulfilling the Rebbe’s horaa.
Till today, when I look at the Chanuka menorah, which we light with mekuravim, I am reminded of my long journey, which is still not completed. The final stop will be lighting the menorah in the third Beis HaMikdash, may it be immediately.