From momentmag.com
By Sarah Breger
Last week, I stumbled on my father’s diary from his first trip to Iran in 2002. My father, Marshall Breger, who died this past August, travelled to Iran three times and spent over 20 years organizing interreligious dialogue with a number of Iranian clerics and scholars. To say that was controversial in the Jewish world would be an understatement, but he believed in the power of cultural exchange and the necessity of face-to-face conversations. The genesis of that first visit was an invitation to give a lecture on constitutional law at Mofid University in Qom, Iran’s second holiest city, but it soon morphed into an 11-day tour all over the country for meetings with scholars, religious leaders and, most importantly to him, the Jewish community. There is something almost eerie in reading his observations from a 2026 vantage point, in the middle of the current conflict; they are a window into what could have been.
Friday June 14, 2002: To my amazement I am met at the airport by a young professor from Mofid and by three members of the Tehran Jewish community—one wearing a kippah. I can almost hear his wry amusement that the men were holding up a sign in Hebrew that said Baruch Habah (welcome) and that they gave him a kosher salami to take on his travels. (That evening I try the salami—not bad.)
He was also surprised by the professor who ended up being his driver and translator for the entire trip and who, as soon as he entered the car, started to pepper me with questions about the differences between Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism. It turned out his guide was a self-taught scholar of Judaism (despite not being Jewish himself)who had translated the Steinsaltz Essential Talmud from English into Farsi. My father would say later that he didn’t realize how many Iranians were deeply interested in Jewish theology and philosophy. In discussing his stay at the law school in Mofid, he noted: My host is an incessant inquirer about Judaism. Just one example—‘If women are not allowed to show their hair if they are married, why should not the State of Israel enforce this rule?’ After wrestling with him about the issues of synagogue and state—I found discussions on the right of return relatively simple.”
‘They assume that youth will determine the next elections and that Iran’s problems will be solved by generational change.’
Sunday June 16: Rarely have I seen women so subservient. In the hotel the guests in chadors beg me to enter before them in the elevator. This was in Qom, by far the most conservative city in Iran. The question of women’s rights and, by extension, how religion plays out in the public square comes up many times in the travel log. When he traveled from Qom to Tehran, he noted a more open and relaxed atmosphere and wrote that women in Tehran merely wore scarves “of sorts” and had developed what he called “modesty chic,” adding: Northern Tehran reminds me of North Tel Aviv, yuppies, parks, broad parkways.
My father wrote that he had many difficult conversations about Israel and observed that Iranians cared deeply about the plight of Palestinians. But some said they were open to the idea of a two-state solution and would accept any deal the Palestinian people agreed to. He was fascinated that Iranians he met drew a sharp distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and that they were more understanding and respectful of Shabbat and kashrut needs than some people in the West.
In Tehran and Isfahan, he met with members of the Jewish communities, who peppered him with questions about Jewish life in America.
After a talk he gave motzei Shabbat (Saturday night) at a synagogue in Tehran, one woman said she had heard kashrut standards were flawed in America: Was that true? Another woman wanted to know if rabbis in America were talking about signs of the moshiach (messiah). “In answering the question about signs of moshiach I told them that many feel the creation of the State of Israel is the dawn of our redemption. I did not pursue the matter.”
In Isfahan, by chance, he had tea in the university guest house with two post-college women—one from Kansas and one from Costa Rica—who had come to learn Farsi. They talked about Iranian society. Her friends, she tells me, care more about jobs (they’re worried) and personal freedoms than reform or revolution. They assume that youth will determine the next elections and that Iran’s problems will be solved by generational change. This was echoed a few days later: Sunday, June 23: I spoke with an acerbic man who lost an arm in the Iran-Iraq war. He was confident about the long term success of reform, pointing out that the conservatives are hoping that the slow pace will turn off youths—or that extreme events—a U.S. invasion for example—would galvanize Iranians to support the regime. In a sense, he said, the conservatives were playing for time, hoping for an external event that would break in their favor.
Hope seemed to be a theme on the trip. The people he met wanted, in their own ways, for Iran to become a more democratic and open society. Of course, that was 24 years ago, and perhaps those he met, by chance or circumstance, were particularly open-minded. Three years after my father’s trip, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be elected and the country would go through governments led by both hardliners and reformists. The system never did democratize, and anti-regime protests, such as those in 2009, 2022-2023 and, most recently, in 2026, were harshly suppressed.
There is no question Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “Death to America, Death to Israel” rhetoric expressed a central feature of the regime’s worldview. But reading this account of my father’s time there has expanded my perception of Iran. I wonder what happened to the people he met and, if they are still alive, what they are thinking today. The American Jewish community often paints Iran in broad strokes, instead of recognizing that it is a complex, multifaceted society.
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