An exchange of letters dating back to the year 1968, on display now in the National Library in honor of the upcoming festival of Purim, shows that representatives of Iranian Jewry sought to purchase the gravesite of Mordechai and Esther in the city of Hamedan, in western Iran, and that the Shah was amenable to their request.
The letters, quoted by Israel Hayom, reveal the negotiations between representatives of the Jewish community in Iran and the Shah, who ruled the country until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The representatives sought to purchase the gravesite, where, according to tradition, Mordechai Hayehudi and Esther Hamalkah, the two main protagonists in the events of Purim, are buried.
The issue of the gravesite is controversial for several reasons, principally because the location is not mentioned in any established Jewish source. An alternative tradition locates the gravesite in the Land of Israel. However, according to several accounts from medieval times, Mordechai and Esther were buried in Hamedan, with one version explaining that following the death of King Achashverosh, the King at the time of the events of Purim and the husband of Esther, supporters of the former viceroy Haman, who had sought to kill the entire Jewish People, tried to take revenge on Esther and Mordechai. The two then fled for their lives to Hamedan, where they later passed away and were buried.
The first account of the gravesite in Hamedan is that provided by Benjamin of Tudela, the famous world-traveler who lived in the 12th century CE. In his records of his journeying, he wrote: "And from that mountain until Hamedan, a journey of ten days, is the great city where around fifty thousand Jews live and where Mordechai and Esther are buried."
The letters on display this week were preserved in the archives of the ORT organization which are kept in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. According to the curator of the Islamic collection of the National Library, Dr. Sam Tropp, the letters prove that the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, saw himself as the successor of King Koresh, Cyrus the Great of Persia, and wished to be viewed as such by Persia's modern-day Jews. The year 1971 was precisely 2,500 years after Cyrus issued what is sometimes referred to as the first-ever declaration of human rights, in 539 BCE, a date that the Shah wished to mark appropriately.
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