Habib Elghanian

Origins and early life

Habib Elghanian was born in Tehran on 5 April 1912 into the Jewish community of Iran, one of the oldest in the world, and became in the decades of the Shah's modernization the most prominent of its businessmen: with his brothers he founded the Plasco company, which brought plastics manufacturing to Iran, and in 1962 he built the Plasco Building, the country's first modern skyscraper, seventeen storeys of steel and glass above the bazaar district of Tehran that stood as the symbol of a new economy until it burned and collapsed in 2017.

Work and career

He employed thousands, Muslims and Jews alike, and he served for years as president of the Tehran Jewish Society, the elected leadership of a community of eighty thousand people who lived, under the Pahlavi monarchy, in a security they had rarely known. After the revolution of February 1979 he was arrested, tried before the revolutionary court of Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali in a hearing that lasted twenty minutes, on charges of 'Zionism', friendship with the enemies of God and espionage for Israel — he had visited Israel and given to its charities, as this fiche states, and had committed no crime known to any law — and on 9 May 1979 he was shot by a firing squad, the first Jew executed by the Islamic Republic.

His death was the signal: the great majority of the Jews of Iran left the country in the years that followed. His granddaughter Shahrzad Elghanayan told his story in Titan of Tehran in 2022.