The Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 4, 1990:
Their first toehold in their new land was no squalid, crowded “Little Tehran” but rather the gracious hillsides of Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills and other nearby neighborhoods of the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.
Khomeini’s revolution drove about half of Iran’s 80,000 Jews into exile. A few headed for New York or Israel, but the vast majority of those emigrants, probably at least 30,000, have settled in or near Beverly Hills.
Not all are fabulously wealthy. While some families have bought or built mansions north of Sunset Boulevard, at least as many are crowded into rent-controlled apartments on the south side of town.
But whether rich or merely middle-class, they have, like most immigrants before them, brought change to their adopted home and have themselves been changed by life in America.
“Before the Iranians came, this city was a sleepy city,” said Beverly Hills real estate broker Stephan Saeed Nourmand, an Iranian who moved to the area in the early ‘70s and has been on hand for the wave that followed. “Sure there were celebrities, but it was still a small town. There was a gas station and a hardware store on Rodeo Drive.”
The Iranians, Nourmand said, brought more than money.
“They brought their talents too. There were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, retailers, manufacturers--a variety of people who came and immediately contributed by boosting Beverly Hills’ international image,” he said
The stamp of Iranian success is seen in the glitzy Rodeo Collection, trendy shops and eateries on Rodeo Drive built by Dar Mahboubi, who is also part-owner of the fashionable Bijan boutiques of Beverly Hills and New York. Adrays, a chain of discount department stores, is owned by Masud Hakim and two partners. And Iranian-born developer Kambiz Hemkat is building a 22-story Center West tower in Westwood.
Nowhere is the immigrants’ impact more evident than in the Beverly Hills Unified School District, where nearly one out of every five students is Iranian. Their language, Farsi, is incorporated in announcements sent home to parents and taught in after-school classes to the children.
The district has hired a full-time counselor to ease the transition for students and to sensitize administrators and teachers to Iranian culture. And thousands of dollars have been contributed by parents to the Beverly Hills schools through the Iranian Education Foundation.
Despite this, many Iranians still manage to live their lives nearly surrounded in the culture of their homeland--going to Iranian nightclubs, worshiping at Iranian synagogues, shopping for clothing and jewelry at Iranian businesses.
The majority of the Beverly Hills-area Iranians are Jewish, and in many respects, they form a community of their own. At times, however, they also function as part of a larger Iranian community that is estimated to number 300,000 in Southern California. For Iranian Muslims, the largest concentrations are in Palos Verdes and Irvine. Ethnic Armenians from Iran have migrated in substantial numbers to Glendale, already home to a large Armenian community.
Gemini says: Persian Jewish business success is driven by a strong cultural emphasis on education, tight-knit community networks that foster trust and mentorship, and a history of forced adaptability. Because of minority status and frequent displacement, they historically gravitated toward easily transportable skills, finance, and trade. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Key factors contributing to their entrepreneurial success include:
- Adaptive Entrepreneurship: Often operating as minorities in environments with restricted land ownership and occupational barriers, Persian Jews developed a strong survival and self-sufficiency instinct. Starting one's own business became the most reliable way to secure a livelihood.
- Deep Community Support: Businesses often thrive because of built-in community networks. Strong trust and loyalty within the network lower transaction costs and encourage sharing resources, mentorship, and contracts with fellow community members.
- Financial Literacy & International Trade: Trading and finance skills have been culturally ingrained over generations. Because of a historic lack of geographic security, many families prioritized tangible, mobile assets (like gold, textiles, and real estate) and built international trade networks spanning from Iran to hubs like Los Angeles and New York.
- Next-Generation Mentorship: Business ownership is often a family affair. Knowledge, capital, and trade connections are deliberately passed down to the younger generation, building compounding economic success over decades. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
