Tehran mayor visits Jewish retirement home

The mayor of Tehran visited a Jewish retirement home and then posted a photo of the event to his Instagram account on Friday.

Mohammad Bagher-Ghalibaf, who has been mayor of the Iranian capital since 2005, was in the past commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force, including control of Iran’s ballistic missiles.

Ghalibaf maintains an active account on the social media photo-sharing site Instagram and has over 25,000 followers.

Iran had between 80,000 and 100,000 Jews before the 1979 Islamic Revolution but most have since fled, mainly to the United States, Israel and Europe. There are now only about 8,500 people left, mostly in Tehran but also in Isfahan and Shiraz, major cities south of the capital.

Many Iranian Jews complain they are not treated equally under the law, Homayoun Sameyah Najaf Abadi, the head of Tehran’s Jewish community and a doctor at Tehran’s Jewish Hospital, said in 2015.

With one designated member of parliament, Iran’s Jewish community is one of three officially recognized religious minorities. Armenian Christians have two designated MPs, and Assyrian-Chaldeans and Zoroastrians have one each.