Sivan Shahab - A Vision of Preservation and Renewal

Sivan Shahab, born in Tehran (1964), immigrated to Israel in 1988, leaving behind an entire world of language, landscapes, and memories. She turned that longing into a life's work: after a rich career in education, psychology, and design, she dedicated herself to a single mission - rescuing the culture of Free Iran and giving it a safe home in Israel.

For nearly four decades she has cultivated a worldwide network of connections with the Iranian diaspora - in the United States, in Europe, and even inside Iran itself. The community she leads numbers more than 20,000 members and has become a living human bridge between the peoples.

In 2020, in a daring operation described in the media as "a spy film", Sivan led the rescue of six monumental statues of Persian culture heroes - among them Cyrus the Great, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and Omar Khayyam - from Tehran to Israel. The statues were unveiled at a state ceremony at the HIT Holon Institute of Technology, attended by the Minister of Culture and the Minister of Intelligence, and they stand there today as the first permanent installation of its kind in the world.

In 2021 she officially founded the Center, which has since held more than 140 events in Israel and around the world. Its crowning achievement: the recreation of Queen Farah Pahlavi's coronation gown - sewn in secret in Tehran by a designer and six seamstresses and smuggled to Israel - displayed for a year and a half at the Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, before more than a million and a half visitors.

Today Sivan is one of the most recognizable voices of the alliance between Israel and Free Iran: a familiar face in Israeli and international media, a regular guest at gatherings of the Iranian diaspora, with a personal connection to the exiled royal family - a meeting with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi in New Jersey, and a moving meeting with Queen Farah Pahlavi in Paris, where the flag of Israel was raised at the height of the war.

Alongside her international work, Sivan sees her activity as a broad social mission: advancing the status of women, supporting new immigrants, and extensive community work in the city of Holon. Her greatest dream - establishing a permanent center for Iranian culture in Israel - is the journey's next step.