Since June 13, when Israel launched attacks on the heart of Iran’s nuclear structure and killed top generals and scientists, and Iran retaliated with long range missiles targeting Israel, David Jacques Farahi has watched the ongoing conflict—including the U.S. entering Israel’s war with Iran by bombing nuclear facilities—with a unique global perspective.
Iran is his family’s motherland. The United States is his family’s home. And, as Iranian Jews, the family looks to Israel as its heartland. Farahi’s grandfather brought his family out of Iran, took risks and worked tirelessly to create financial success in the United States, and is now buried in Jerusalem.
With ties to all three countries, does Farahi feel any ambivalence about the current war?
“I have no ambivalence,” he says. “Israel is not just fighting for its own survival. It is defending America and standing with the oppressed people of Iran.”
Farahi is a multifaceted investor and philanthropist who is recognized for his strategic leadership in the hospitality and gaming industries. He brings deep experience to corporate settings as a board member and to the academic world as an adjunct professor at Metro State University. He speaks French and Persian but confesses he wishes “my Hebrew was better.”
He has never visited the land where his grandfather and father were born because, he says, Iranians “would do a quick Google search and decide I am a Zionist spy and hang me.”
“Iranians call Israel ‘Little Satan,’ but they call America the ‘Big Satan,’” he says. “Israel is on the front line of a defense against an Iranian regime that wants to destroy America. This is no secret. Just listen to the words of the regime. Israel is fighting for the benefit of the United States.”
A brief history of Jews in Iran
“Before Christianity, before Islam, Jews lived in Iran,” Farahi says, including his and his wife’s ancestors. Prior to the 1979 revolution that transformed the country from a monarchy to an Islamic Republic, there were more than 150,000 Jews living in the country.
The most substantial Jewish communities have existed in cities like Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. In the 19th century, in the city of Mashhad, Jews were forced to convert to Islam under threat of death. Publicly, they converted. Secretly, they continued to practice Judaism until they could escape persecution by migrating to other locations.
In Hamadan, Iran, Jews can still pray at the tomb of Esther and Mordecai. It is also the city where Farahi’s wife’s maternal grandfather was a rabbi.
“In Iran, Jews’ rights and their ability to live freely as equal citizens has gotten better at some points, worse at others,” Farahi says. “But there has always been a continuous Jewish presence in the Persian Empire since the destruction of the First Temple.”
A brief history of the Farahi family
Farahi’s grandfather, also named David, was born in 1918 in Tehran. It was not a good time to be Jewish.
“When it rained, my grandfather, as a child, was not allowed to go outside,” Farahi recounts. “Authorities would say that the rain would wash off the ‘dirty Jew’ and contaminate the drinking water.”
Farahi’s grandfather grew up in poverty, the son of a tailor, but he had a vision of a better life. He earned a degree in pharmacy, started different businesses, and when his oldest son John turned 15, he sent him to live in the San Francisco Bay Area with a Bahá’í family. Speaking no English, John, who is David Jacques Farahi’s father, had to figure out life in this new country.
In Iran, his family worried that the Bahá’í family might convert him. Then they received a report from America. “Don’t worry,” it said. “John’s Jewish identity is so strong that he will likely convert us before we can convert him.”
Over time, Farahi’s grandfather sent John’s two younger brothers to join him. Finally, in 1970, the family was reunited when David’s grandfather and grandmother and their youngest child traveled to California.
Two years later, a real estate agent made an audacious pitch to the elder David Farahi. Would he like to buy a small motel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada? David Farahi replied, in no uncertain terms, that he was not interested in buying property in “the land of prostitution and divorce.” But he looked at it, and something about the topography of the area reminded him of Tehran. The deal was done.
For decades, the entire family worked to build the 100-room motel into something bigger and better. Today, with more than 800 rooms, it is the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa. Boasting a skywalk that connects to the Reno-Tahoe Convention Center, it is Reno’s number one resort for 11 straight years on TripAdvisor.
Through the years, John Farahi earned a reputation as a respected business leader and a perfectionist. If he saw something out of order in the hotel—a napkin on the floor—he would bend over and pick it up himself. Today, the company has codified that culture in what they call “The Bend Over Policy.”
“We talk about it in Team Member training,” Farahi says. “If you see something that is not right, do what you can to address it immediately.”
In 1994, the company went public as Monarch Casino and Resort, and in April 2012, purchased the Riveria Black Hawk in Colorado. They spent the next decade investing half a billion dollars, turning Monarch Casino Resort Spa Black Hawk into an award-winning gem of Colorado’s gaming and resort industry, the culmination of the vision of a poor young man in Tehran.
“My grandfather knew that Iran was not the future,” Farahi says. “It was not a meritocracy. He saw America as the land of opportunity, and that is what he wanted for his family. Our family believes America is an incredible melting pot, a place that works hard to integrate immigrants into society, because we all make each other better.”
Israel’s war
Farahi says that Israel and Zionism have been a part of his family’s kitchen table discussions for as long as he can remember, and before his early memories, it was a part of his parents’ kitchen table discussions.
“To us, supporting Jewish people and strengthening Israel is the central cause,” he says. “Going a step further, we take to heart the idea that Jews are a light unto all nations. To support the Jewish people is not just an end unto itself. It supports our role to be a better example for the rest of humanity.”
That is the foundation for Farahi’s support of Israel’s actions in Iran.
“It is the right thing to free the Iranian population from their oppressors of the past 46 years,” he says. “Regime change is tricky, and it is not the primary war objective, but it would be a nice outcome.”
Farahi says he has heard from reputable sources that the current Iranian regime is deeply unpopular with 80 to 85 percent of Iranians. He is tracking social media, indicating there are Iranians who may despise Israel publicly but “would not mind” if the current conflict led to regime change.
“Those looking for a popular uprising need to be patient because all Iranians are scared,” he says. “The current regime has a monopoly on violence. Even though Israel is acting effectively, strategically, and surgically, none of us can blame the population for being afraid for their lives. We will see what happens when this campaign ends.”
Farahi believes that even if there is no regime change, Israel has degraded the regime’s ability to have a police state.
“It has exposed the regime for the paper tiger that it is,” he says. “To my view, of all the incredible, miraculous things that Israel accomplished in the first 48 hours of the attack—even more impactful than the destruction of the nuclear facilities—was the humiliation and decapitation of leadership with the deaths of 14 military and scientific leaders.”
In Farahi’s mind, by initiating the attack on Iran, Israel has sent an exceptionally strong message to allies and enemies for the future: “Israel can do things by herself.”
That is surely a victory for Israel and for the Farahi family, whose patriarch’s grave in Jerusalem bears this inscription:
“A proud Jewish patriarch who breathed humility, taught Zionism, and embraced his family with love, leaving a righteous legacy.”