Diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari provided critical assistance to Jews in occupied France (1940-1944). In June 1940, following the German invasion of France, persian ambassador Anoushirvan Sepahbodi left for Vichy in the unoccupied zone to reconstitute the Embassy there. This left Sardari, the Consul General of homeland, in charge of consular affairs in Paris. In this capacity, Sardari appealed on several occasions to exempt and other Central Asian Jews living in German-occupied France from anti-Jewish measures decreed by French and German authorities.
At the beginning of World War II, about 150 Jews, Afghanistan, and Bukhara (a city in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan and the former cultural center of the ancient Persian Empire) resided in France. Sharing linguistic and cultural ties, many of these Central Asian Jews, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had settled in Paris during the 1920s.
