Iranian Testimonies

As a Jewish kid growing up in Tehran, Shohreh went to a Jewish school. Every Monday and Thursday she would go to synagogue and sing songs, open the Torah, and read from the siddur. Her father would tell stories from the Torah and passionately recount the story of Passover.

In 1977, Shohreh moved to New York for school and a year later the Iranian revolution started. She started to question the meaning of life as everything seemed to fall apart in her home country. Shohreh wanted to be a person who could make a positive difference in the world, so she started taking self-empowerment courses. When both of Shohreh’s parents fell ill, all of what she learned in her courses only took her so far, and she realized that there was no way she could fix her own problems.

She started reading the Torah and realized that God was speaking to her through it. She saw a continuous theme of a sacrifice required for sins and remembered the stories about the Mashiach that her grandfather told. She realized that Yeshua came to fulfill promises that God set out in the Torah.

When she was a child, Shohreh would go to the synagogue and go to the rabbi to pray for her or send written prayers with people going to Jerusalem to pray at the Western Wall. Now, Shohreh rejoices that she can take her cares and concerns to Yeshua and experience the peace that comes with faith.

Pirooz went to a Jewish school in Tehran, where he learned Hebrew, English, and Farsi. Pirooz remembers praying the Shema and openly talking to God as a child. In his family, things were out of sorts: his parents fought with each other, and one evening Pirooz had a tremendous earache. His grandmother instructed his father to bring a lamb, have the rabbi come and say a blessing, and then sacrifice the lamb. The family gathered, the rabbi prayed, and the sheep was sacrificed. Immediately, the earache went away. Pirooz remembers distinctively that the prayers over the lamb were for a wound, for sins.

Eventually, Pirooz moved to the United States for school and flourished in his educational and career path, becoming a software developer. Many of his clients were Christians and the fact that they talked about Yeshua like they knew Him personally was offensive to him. However, Pirooz was intrigued by their faith, and challenged since they knew more about his Jewish Bible than he did. So he started reading the Torah and read Isaiah 53. Immediately he thought of the lamb from all those years ago, and Jesus became real to him.

To not upset his family he stayed silent. However, when his son got in a serious accident, all Pirooz could pray was that God would bring his son back to him whole. With each hour his son improved. It was a miraculous healing. Pirooz is now so full of joy that Yeshua healed his son, he cannot remain silent anymore.

Hear his story at I Found Shalom.