Amid nuke debates, Iranian president says ‘L’shanah tovah!’

Jake Fullerton blew into his new shofar Monday moments before he and his family entered Newark’s Temple Beth El to attend Rosh Hashanah service and celebrate the start of the Jewish New Year.

But Rouhani on Sunday called for a deeper respect between the often hostile pair, saying he hoped their “shared Abrahamic roots” would lead to “peace and mutual understanding”.

The comment on September 14 did not appear on the Farsi version of Rohani’s account. He is believed to have tweeted a similar greeting in 2013, but presidential advisors denied he had posted it.

An estimated 9,000 Jews still live in Iran, down from more than 100,000 before the Islamic revolution of 1979.

A number of other social media users pointed out that for most Jews, the Iranian regime’s constant threats to destroy Israel would likely not be considered peaceful. Then-Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi once accused Jews as a whole of being drug dealers. Rouhani also allocated the equivalent of $400,000 to a Jewish charity hospital in Tehran and invited the country’s only Jewish lawmaker to accompany him to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2013.

Tensions between Tehran and Israel have been fraught in recent months, after Iran signed up to a momentous nuclear deal with world powers – an agreement blasted by the Israeli prime minister as “a historic mistake”.