New details have emerged about Iran’s rare execution this week of a member of its tiny Jewish minority.

VOA has learned that Arvin Ghahremani, the first Jewish person executed by the Islamic Republic in 30 years, was put to death in the western city of Kermanshah on Monday without prior notice to his family. Iranian authorities had convicted Ghahremani, who was in his early 20s, of murdering a Muslim man in a 2022 street altercation over money, following a legal process that rights activists denounced as unfair and tainted by antisemitism.

A U.S.-based source with contacts in Iran sent VOA the text of a letter that Ghahremani’s Iranian lawyer, Peyman Saketkhou, wrote on Tuesday and stated that Ghahremani had been executed without notice to family members or defense lawyers.

Saketkhou said he had done everything he could to try to vacate the death sentence, but the family of the man who Ghahremani killed had exercised its legal right to reject financial compensation from the Ghahremani family in lieu of execution.

The source also sent VOA a funeral notice printed by Ghahremani’s immediate family, informing mourners that his funeral would be held on Wednesday at Kermanshah’s Etehad Synagogue, where his uncle is a community leader. Other relatives of Ghahremani live in Los Angeles, the source added. The funeral notice was first published on X by Iranian American journalist Karmel Melamed on Tuesday.

The source requested anonymity to safeguard communications with Iran-based lawyers, whose work on cases dealing with sensitive issues has exposed them to harassment and arrest by Iranian authorities.

“The execution of Ghahremani without notice to the family shows the cruelty of the regime,” George Haroonian, an Iranian American rights activist, said in a statement to VOA.

Kermanshah is home to one of Iran’s smallest Jewish communities. The largest is in the capital, Tehran. The State Department’s latest annual report on international religious freedom, published in June, cites the Tehran Jewish Committee as saying Iran has about 9,000 Jews out of an estimated total population of 89 million people.

Iran’s last execution of a Jewish community member was in February 1994. Feysollah Mechubad, a 77-year-old man, was executed at the time for “associating with Zionism,” a reference to the Islamic Republic’s archenemy, Israel. Prior to that, Iran executed two other Jews — Habib Elghanian and Avraham Boruchim, in 1979 and 1980, respectively, at the start of its Islamic Revolution.

The Biden administration issued its first reaction to Ghahremani’s execution on Wednesday.

“We are dismayed by reports that the regime in Iran executed Arvin Ghahramani. The circumstances of the case and prosecution raise troubling questions about due process,” U.S. special envoy Deborah Lipstadt said in a post on the X platform.

Iran’s U.N. mission in New York declined to comment when asked by VOA for a response to Lipstadt’s statement.

In May, when Iranian authorities transferred Ghahremani to death row, Lipstadt noted in another X post that the Islamic Republic “often subject(s) Jewish citizens to different standards when it comes to determining judgements in cases of this nature.”

Ghahremani had been sentenced to death under Iran’s Islamic legal principle of qisas, or an “eye for an eye.” It gives a victimized party the right to inflict harm on the perpetrator that is similar to what the victim suffered, or to accept blood money from the offending party or to forgive that offender.

In a report published Monday, Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights cited an informed source as saying Ghahremani’s religion initially was cited as Shiite Muslim in the case, and the family of the Muslim man he killed had agreed to accept blood money from Ghahremani’s family. But the group said the slain man’s family changed its mind and insisted on execution after discovering that Ghahremani was Jewish.

Originally Published By Michael Lipin, Jewish Breaking News   PHOTO: Use according to Section 27 A