The Media Line: From Tehran to Tunis, Rabbis Bring to the EU One Message: Jewish Life Matters 

From Tehran to Tunis, Rabbis Bring to the EU One Message: Jewish Life Matters 

Rabbis serving Jewish communities across the Muslim world seek European support for religious life, heritage preservation, and security as regional conflicts place growing pressure on vulnerable populations 

By Jacob Wirtschafter / The Media Line 

An alliance of rabbis serving Jewish communities from Morocco to Iran met with three European commissioners in Brussels on Monday and convened its board inside the European Parliament, asking the European Union (EU) to help Jewish life across the Muslim world survive and grow. 

Iran’s chief rabbi sat among them on the same day Britain proscribed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and identified a Tehran-backed group as being behind attacks on Jewish sites across Europe. The communities these rabbis serve range from a handful of families to tens of thousands of people, and public Jewish life has grown more difficult for many since October 2023, from the Gulf to the Caucasus. 

The Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States (ARIS), founded in 2019 by Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, the Ashkenazi rabbi of Istanbul, presented a survey. Titled “Jewish Communities and Heritage in the Muslim World,” the survey covers communities from the Balkans to Southeast Asia and reads as both an inventory and an appeal: synagogue registration, rabbinic visas, protection for cemeteries and safe passage for religious articles at borders. 

ARIS describes its work as practical and its posture as nonpolitical. Chitrik reached back to Jeremiah’s charge to the exiles in Babylon: Seek the welfare of the city and pray to God on its behalf. “We pray for the welfare of our countries and our governments,” Chitrik said. “We are loyal citizens, deeply rooted in the societies we call home. We are not political actors.” Their presence itself carries a message, he added: Jews and Muslims are not fated to live in conflict, and the coexistence they sustain across the Muslim world can serve as an example for Europe. 

Much of the alliance’s work is the plumbing of Jewish life in places with almost no Jews: kosher supervision, mikvahs (ritual baths), marriages, burials and schooling. In 2021, it helped get Zebulon Simentov, long described as Afghanistan’s last openly practicing Jew, out of the country. 

“Before ARIS, every rabbi was often working alone,” Chitrik told The Media Line. “Today, when a community needs help, whether rebuilding a mikvah in Tunisia, strengthening Jewish education in Nigeria, or resolving practical challenges in Central Asia, that rabbi is no longer on his own. We share experience, mobilize partners, and, when needed, engage governments together. The alliance gives even the smallest Jewish community the confidence that it is part of something larger.” 

Three commissioners sat with the rabbis: Dubravka Šuica, commissioner for the Mediterranean; Magnus Brunner, commissioner for internal affairs; and Olivér Várhelyi, commissioner for health and animal welfare. Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s coordinator on combating antisemitism, joined them, along with members of the European Parliament and diplomats. 

Two other guests attended the dinner: Nikolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, and Aryeh Lightstone, a senior adviser to the board. Neither addressed the group. Chitrik said both have long-standing ties to the alliance. 

The Hardest Case 

The rabbi everyone watched was Yehuda Gerami, Iran’s chief rabbi since 2011. 

ARIS provided The Media Line with his remarks to Brunner. “When tensions rise in the region, we also feel the consequences, both as Iranians and as Jews,” Gerami said. “Our community is not political. Our concern is to preserve our religious life, our institutions, and this ancient heritage for future generations.” He said the Jewish community has maintained a presence in Iran for more than 2,500 years and asked the EU for understanding, cooperation and practical support. 

Gerami also told Brunner, Chitrik said, that close to 20,000 Jews live in Iran, that the community maintains about 60 synagogues and six kosher restaurants, and that Iranian synagogues need no guards at their doors. 

That same Monday morning, Britain said an Iran-backed group had directed a wave of arson and vandalism against Jewish sites in the country. London banned the group, the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right, and proscribed Iran’s IRGC as a threat to national security. Security Minister Angela Eagle said the group had claimed responsibility for seven attacks in Britain and that the IRGC’s Quds Force had almost certainly directed its attacks across Europe. The foreign secretary summoned Iran’s ambassador. The group has also claimed responsibility for attacks on synagogues in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

None of Gerami’s assertions were new. He told a US audience in 2021 that Iran is the only place where synagogues need no guards, that Jews there must be careful because they are guests, and that stressing they are not political is sometimes very hard. 

The alliance’s survey is more measured. It describes Iran’s Jewish community as religiously active but living in a sensitive political environment marked by emigration, limits on travel to the US and Europe, separation from relatives in Israel, and the strain of military service and movement restrictions on young men. 

Jewish life in the United Arab Emirates grew rapidly after the 2020 Abraham Accords. The alliance describes the country as tolerant and accepting, and the survey counts a few thousand Jewish residents and as many as half a million Jewish visitors a year. Public Jewish life there has become more discreet since October 2023, it reports, particularly after the killing of Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan in late 2024. In Dagestan, a Muslim-majority Russian republic, the survey records a mob storming Makhachkala airport in October 2023 after a rumor spread that Israelis were landing there, followed the next summer by attacks on synagogues and churches in Derbent and Makhachkala. 

Again and again, the survey describes communities exposed to events they had no part in starting. 

Yoram Meital has watched the changing place of Jewish heritage in the region up close. A historian of Egyptian Jewry at Ben-Gurion University and author of Sacred Places Tell Tales:

Jacob1.jpg – (From left): Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, chair of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States; Chief Rabbi Albert Guigui of Brussels; the UAE’s ambassador to the European Union, Mohamed Ismail Al Sahlawi; Rabbi Levi Banon of Casablanca, reciting a prayer for Morocco’s King Mohammed VI; Morocco’s ambassador to the EU, Ahmed Reda Chami; and Rabbi Levi Matusof of Paris, who coordinated the event, in Brussels, July 13, 2026. (Gabriel Lelievre)