Raphael Luzon was bar-mitzvah age when he left his home and his homeland. Along with most of Libya’s 7,000 remaining Jews, Luzon’s family fled, virtually empty-handed in 1967, after anti-Jewish riots threatened the Jewish community following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.

Luzon settled in England, but his heart stayed in Libya.

School days can be stressful enough. In Iran it is a challenging experience in more ways than usual for a Jewish teenager.

At a recent ISEF luncheon at Sotheby’s in New York, to raise scholarship funds for needy students in Israel, Roya Hakakian recounted growing up in Iran after the 1979 revolution.

For a Christian, Jew or Zoroastrian there was constant pressure at school to convert. Roya could not evade such pressure, even though she went to a Hebrew day school.

One day her class was called to assemble in the basement near the cafeteria.