When the Mossad spy and computer hacker Tamar Rabinyan slips into Iran on a mission to help demolish its nuclear program, she’s on familiar ground. Chased in the Israeli television thriller Tehran through the Iranian capital’s gritty alleys and markets, the young agent ducks into a safe house that her bosses in Tel Aviv know nothing about. Answering the door with a look of haunted shock is her old Aunt Arezoo, who had stayed behind in Tehran with a Muslim husband when the rest of her Jewish family fled the country decades before.
Of all the improbable plot twists that captivated Israelis this summer through the series’s eight episodes on the Israeli Public Broadcasting network, finding sanctuary with a long-lost Iranian relative may have been the most plausible. Some 140,000 Israelis trace their roots to Iran, including an ex-president, a former army chief of staff, and a small constellation of pop stars. Even today, as the two countries regard each other as mortal enemies, about 10,000 Jews live in Iran as an officially protected minority, down from 80,000 in the 1940s.
