Source: Middle East Times
Wire Service: AFP
http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20061004-074915-3276r
Flicking through photographs of immigrant Zoroastrian friends in sunny California, 40-year-old Farzad Dehnavizadeh sighs and wishes that the young people of his faith stopped leaving Iran for the West.
His 40,000-strong Zoroastrian community has survived centuries of conquest, oppression, and forced conversion to keep their 3,200-year-old monotheistic faith alive and guard ancient traditions in Shiite Muslim majority Iran.
But having withstood the ravages of history, the community is now threatened by emigration, which is robbing the Zoroastrians of their precious youth day-by-day.
Precise figures of the scale of the exodus are not available but sources in the community estimate that at the very least hundreds of young Zoroastrians are leaving Iran for the United States or Canada every year.