When your family originally hails from Shushan, Persia (today the Iranian city of Chamdon), Purim brings back memories of pistachio sweets and holiday trips to the nearby graves of local heroes Mordechai and Esther.

A great distance away from the Iranian town of his youth, Rabbi Yitzchok Chayempour of the Chabad Persian Center of Great Neck is preparing to read the ancient story of Purim to his congregation.

Great Neck is home to one of the largest Jewish-Iranian communities in the world, with more than 3,000 families. Most arrived in this Long Island town after the Islamic Revolution. Rabbi Chayempour, his wife Tamar and their six children have been embraced by a fertile and receptive community of fellow immigrant. One of Chayempour's first tasks was to begin the translations of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's sichot into Farsi.

"We both worked as shluchim in Ladispoli, Italy, attending to the needs of Persian Jews in transit from Iran to the United States," recalls the Chabad Center co-director Tamar Chayempour. "Four years ago we followed them to Great Neck.

"When a community is uprooted, this can have a devastating effect on their Jewish observance."

Rabbi Chayempour, who is also the principal of the newly established Sephardi Hebrew Academy of the North Shore, concurs. "The material affluence and political stability one finds in America can swiftly escalate the descent into assimilation. Our Center's mission is to preserve the heritage of Persian Jews while benefiting from American democracy.

"You can say we learned our social activism from Mordechai and Esther..."