Israel’s Persian community is estimated at around 250,000 people, though only about 50,000 were actually born in Iran, with the rest being second- and third-generation Israelis of Iranian descent.
As the war with Iran continues to shape daily life in Israel, one of the country’s largest language schools is seeing growing interest in an unexpected direction: Persian.
Dialogue, a long-established language school at Israel’s Open University that teaches a wide range of languages, will be offering Farsi classes in the summer, the school’s manager told The Press Service of Israel.
“Over the past year, we received a number of inquiries from people interested in the possibility of learning Persian, which we had not taught before. So we decided to take up the challenge and build a new course to teach the language,” Tamir Agasi, the school manager, told TPS-IL.