Drive west along Ventura Boulevard on a Friday afternoon and the signage starts to speak in two scripts. Persian flows beside English above a grocer’s window, a bakery’s awning, a jeweller’s door. This is the heart of the Persians in Encino, California, a community that arrived as exiles and built one of the most prosperous Iranian settlements anywhere outside Tehran.
The Place
Encino sits in the southern San Fernando Valley, pressed up against the north slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. Its name is Spanish for the holm oak, a nod to the ancient grove the Portola Expedition camped beside in 1769, naming the basin the Valley of the Oaks.
Today the neighbourhood spreads across roughly 9.5 square miles between Sherman Oaks to the east and Tarzana to the west, its hillside estates and leafy flatland streets stitched together by Ventura Boulevard. About 53,000 people live here, in a place that wears old money lightly and keeps a small-town ease along its main commercial spine.
How It Became Persian
Encino did not set out to become a Persian neighbourhood. It became one the way exile communities usually do: through a single rupture, followed by decades of family knitting itself back together a few blocks at a time.
Before the revolution
A small Iranian presence had existed in greater Los Angeles since the 1960s, students and professionals scattered mostly around Westwood near the university. The numbers were modest. There was no enclave, no concentration, nothing that would have suggested what was coming.
Encino in those years was a comfortable Valley suburb, its character set by mid-century Jewish families who had settled north of the hills. Valley Beth Shalom, the Conservative synagogue, had already taken root, founded in the 1950s and anchored on Ventura Boulevard. The infrastructure for a large Jewish community was quietly in place before the people who would fill it had any reason to leave home.
The 1979 rupture
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 changed everything. As the Shah fell and the new order took hold, hundreds of thousands of Iranians fled, and a disproportionate share of them were Jews who saw no future under a theocracy. They left Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan, often with little more than what they could carry, and a great many of them came to Los Angeles.
It was one of the wealthiest waves of immigrants ever to reach the United States, and also one of the most traumatised. Families that had been merchants, doctors, and goldsmiths for generations arrived as refugees. Many landed first in Beverly Hills and Westwood, the areas that would later be nicknamed Tehrangeles.
The scale was extraordinary. Estimates of the wider Iranian American population in greater Los Angeles run into the hundreds of thousands, the largest such community anywhere outside Iran, and the Jewish share of it gave the diaspora a density of institutions that few exile communities ever manage. Synagogues, schools, charities, and newspapers appeared almost as fast as the families themselves.
The move over the hill
As the first wave settled and grew, families looked north for space. The San Fernando Valley offered larger houses, good public schools, and a quieter pace than the Westside, and the 101 corridor carried the community over the Sepulveda Pass into Encino, Tarzana, and Sherman Oaks.
The pattern was chain migration in its purest form. One family bought a house near a relative, then a cousin followed, then friends from the same synagogue in Tehran, until whole stretches of Ventura Boulevard had a Persian texture. The institutions came with the people. The oldest and largest Persian Jewish organisation in California, Eretz-SIAMAK, was established in 1979 itself and grew into a Valley anchor just to the west in Tarzana.
Building the everyday
What turned a population into a neighbourhood was the ordinary commerce of daily life. Persian-owned bakeries, kebab houses, grocers, and professional offices opened along Ventura Boulevard, and the bilingual signage that defines the street today began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s.
Synagogues that had been built for an earlier generation of American Jews found themselves filling with Iranian families. At Valley Beth Shalom and across the Valley’s congregations, Persian Jews became central to keeping the institutions vital, bringing their own liturgical traditions and a fierce attachment to community.
By the turn of the century the transformation was unmistakable. Census tabulations for Encino later recorded that roughly a third of residents were foreign-born, and that Iran was by far the single largest country of origin among them.
The Landmarks
Valley Beth Shalom, 15739 Ventura Boulevard. Founded in the 1950s and grown into one of the largest Conservative synagogues in the United States, with around 1,500 member families. Long led by the renowned Rabbi Harold Schulweis until his death in 2014, it became a spiritual home for many of Encino’s Persian Jewish families, who joined a congregation older than their own arrival.
Sadaf Restaurant, 16240 Ventura Boulevard. A long-running Persian and Mediterranean restaurant on the boulevard, with a full bar, an outdoor patio, and a banquet room that has hosted countless community celebrations. It is the kind of place where a kebab lunch and a family engagement party can happen under the same roof on the same afternoon.
Sabzee Mediterranean Market, 17461 Ventura Boulevard. Its name is the Farsi word for greens, and the shop is a one-stop market for Persian, Israeli, Russian, and broader Middle Eastern groceries. There is a bakery where customers watch sangak bread baked with sesame seeds, a deli, and a counter of hot kabobs and stews. Owner Hoss Zadeh has been known to greet newcomers with samples of kashk bademjan.
Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center, 6170 Wilbur Avenue, Tarzana. Just over the Encino line, this is the oldest Persian Jewish organisation in California and the largest in the San Fernando Valley. Established in 1979, it runs daily prayers, immigrant and social services, business networking, and publishes the Iranian Jewish Chronicle, subsidising living costs for scores of struggling Persian Jewish families.
Gelson’s, corner of Hayvenhurst Avenue and Ventura Boulevard. The oldest continuously operated Gelson’s, open since 1960, predates the Persian arrival entirely. Yet its aisles now stock the saffron, dried limes, and barberries that a Persian kitchen runs on, a small everyday measure of how the neighbourhood’s tastes have reshaped even its old institutions.
Los Encinos State Historic Park, 16756 Moorpark Street. The five-acre remnant of Rancho Los Encinos, with its nine-room de la Ossa Adobe and natural spring, preserves the deep history that gave the neighbourhood its name. For families who arrived in the 1980s it offers a quiet lesson: this valley has been a place of arrival and reinvention for far longer than any of them.
Where They Came From
The Persians of Encino are overwhelmingly Iranian Jews, and they trace their roots to a community that lived in Iran for more than two and a half thousand years. The largest contingents come from Tehran, the capital, where most of the country’s Jewish professional and merchant class had concentrated by the twentieth century.
Older provincial cities matter too. Shiraz and Isfahan, both with ancient Jewish quarters, sent families whose names and customs still carry the inflection of those places. What united them was not region but the timing and reason for departure: the revolution of 1979 and the years of uncertainty that followed.
That shared rupture is why the community feels so cohesive. People did not drift to Encino over generations. They arrived together, from the same handful of cities, fleeing the same event, and they rebuilt in close formation.
It is worth saying what they brought with them, beyond capital and qualifications. Iranian Jews carried a religious tradition with its own melodies and liturgy, a cuisine built on rice, herbs, and slow stews, and a powerful sense of obligation to family and community. Those things travel lighter than property, and they are what made the rebuilding in Encino feel less like starting over and more like continuing.
Encino Today
Encino now is a settled rather than a striving community. The refugees of 1979 are grandparents, their children are doctors, lawyers, and developers, and the grandchildren are American in accent and Persian at the dinner table. The trauma of exile has cooled into memory, marked at Nowruz and Shabbat tables rather than carried as a daily weight.
The boulevard still tells the story plainly. Persian script shares awnings with English from Sherman Oaks to Tarzana, the markets sell sangak and saffron, and the synagogues that an earlier generation built now run on the energy of Iranian families. It is one of the most affluent and most rooted diaspora neighbourhoods in the country.
There is loss inside the prosperity, as there always is. The Iran these families left no longer exists for them, and the youngest generation knows Tehran only through photographs and their grandparents’ stories. What endures in Encino is the texture of a transplanted life, kept alive on a Valley boulevard half a world from where it began.
The story of the Persians in Encino sits within a wider Iranian map of Southern California. Families spread west to the Persian community in Woodland Hills and settled the neighbouring blocks of Iranian Tarzana, while others pushed out to Persian Thousand Oaks in Ventura County. The diaspora reaches far beyond the Valley, too, to the Iranian community in Atlanta. Encino’s Jewish character also echoes that of fellow Middle Eastern arrivals, like the Israelis of Palo Alto to the north.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Persians in Encino, California?
The Persians in Encino, California, are largely Iranian Jews who fled after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After settling first on the Westside, families moved over the hills into the San Fernando Valley for larger homes and good schools, and chain migration concentrated them in Encino, Tarzana, and Sherman Oaks.
Are the Persians in Encino mostly Iranian Jewish?
Yes. While Encino is also home to Iranian Muslims, Armenians, and others, the dominant Persian presence is Iranian Jewish. The community built and sustains synagogues, kosher markets, and cultural organisations across the Valley, including the long-established Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center in neighbouring Tarzana.
What percentage of Encino residents were born in Iran?
Census-based tabulations recorded that about a third of Encino residents were foreign-born, and that Iran was by far the largest single country of origin among them, well ahead of the next-largest group, Russia. This made Iran the leading source country for the neighbourhood’s immigrants.
Where do Persians shop and eat in Encino?
Ventura Boulevard is the main commercial spine. Sabzee Mediterranean Market at 17461 Ventura Boulevard sells Persian groceries, fresh sangak bread, and prepared stews, while Sadaf Restaurant at 16240 Ventura Boulevard has long served Persian and Mediterranean food alongside a banquet space for community celebrations.
When did the Persian community in Encino form?
The community took shape from 1979 onward. Although a small Iranian presence existed in Los Angeles from the 1960s, the revolution triggered the mass migration, and the move into Encino and the wider Valley gathered pace through the 1980s and 1990s as families followed relatives over the Sepulveda Pass.
What is Tehrangeles and how does Encino fit in?
Tehrangeles is the nickname for Los Angeles as a centre of the Iranian diaspora, the largest such community outside Iran. Its core lies in Westwood and Beverly Hills, but the San Fernando Valley neighbourhoods of Encino and Tarzana form a major secondary hub, especially for Iranian Jewish families.
If your family’s story passed through Encino, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Jewish quarter in Tehran or Shiraz to a bilingual storefront on Ventura Boulevard, to wherever you are now.