On a warm Friday afternoon along Ventura Boulevard, the air outside an Iranian kabob house carries saffron and grilled tomato, and the conversation drifting from the next table slips easily between Persian and English. This is the everyday texture of the Persians in Tarzana, a community that turned an affluent San Fernando Valley neighbourhood named after a fictional jungle hero into one of the most settled centres of Iranian, and especially Iranian Jewish, life in America.
The Place
Tarzana sits in the southern San Fernando Valley, bounded by Encino to the east, Reseda to the north, Woodland Hills to the west, and the green wall of Topanga State Park to the south. It is a low-density, leafy neighbourhood of roughly 38,000 people, built around single-family homes on generous lots, with Ventura Boulevard running through it as the commercial spine.
The neighbourhood is unusually wealthy. The median home value sits north of two million dollars, placing Tarzana among the most expensive corners of California. That combination of space, good public schools, and proximity to the Westside is exactly what drew an immigrant generation looking to put down roots.
How It Became Persian
The name itself is an accident of Hollywood. In March 1919, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan novels, bought a 550-acre ranch in the Valley and called it Tarzan Ranch. As Los Angeles spread around the property in the 1920s, Burroughs subdivided it and sold off home sites. When a post office opened around 1930 and the few hundred residents held a contest to name their settlement, the winning entry was Tarzana.
For its first half-century the neighbourhood was a quiet, largely white Valley suburb of ranch houses, citrus, and horse property. There was nothing Persian about it. The Iranians arrived later, and from a very different direction, carried not by gradual immigration but by a single political rupture thousands of miles away.
1979 and the great departure
The turning point came with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As the monarchy fell and the Islamic Republic took shape, tens of thousands of Iranians left, and among them was almost the entire Persian Jewish community, a population that traced its presence in Iran back more than 2,500 years to the era of Cyrus the Great.
For Iran’s Jews, the revolution was not merely a change of government but an existential prompt to leave. The community that departed was, by the measure of the time, one of the wealthiest immigrant waves ever to reach the United States, and it arrived largely intact, families and synagogue communities moving together rather than as scattered individuals. Much of that story is documented in the archive of Iranian Jewish life in Los Angeles.
Many of these families arrived with capital, professional training, and a clear instinct for where to settle. The first and densest concentration formed on the Westside, in Westwood and the stretch of Tehrangeles around Westwood Boulevard, and in Beverly Hills. From there, the community fanned outward.
Crossing into the Valley
As that first wave grew and had children, families looked for more house and more land for their money. The San Fernando Valley answered. Tarzana, along with neighbouring Encino and Woodland Hills, offered larger homes, quieter streets, and schools that families trusted, all within a short drive of the established Persian core over the hill.
By the time the children of the 1979 generation were starting their own families in the 1990s and 2000s, Tarzana had become a recognised second home for Persian Los Angeles. The Iranian-born share of the neighbourhood climbed into double digits, and Persian became one of the most commonly spoken languages in its households, with roughly one resident in six speaking it at home.
The move had a logic that was as much about family as geography. A grandmother in Tarzana could be a fifteen-minute drive from grandchildren in Encino and a half-hour from cousins still in Beverly Hills. The Valley did not replace the Westside core so much as extend it, giving the same community a quieter, more spacious place to raise a third American-born generation.
A community that built institutions
What distinguishes Tarzana from a place where Iranians simply happen to live is the density of institutions the community created. Synagogues, cultural centres, markets, and restaurants clustered along and around Ventura Boulevard, turning the neighbourhood into a working centre of Persian Jewish life rather than just a residential address.
The Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center, founded by refugees of the revolution, anchors much of that life. It describes itself as the oldest Persian Jewish organisation in California and the largest in the San Fernando Valley, and it has grown to combine a synagogue, social services, and cultural programming under one roof. Over the years it has subsidised living costs for struggling Persian Jewish families and given the wider Iranian community a place to gather that is theirs.
Around it, smaller Persian Orthodox Sephardic congregations took hold, drawing worshippers who wanted to keep the specific liturgy and customs they had carried out of cities like Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan. Today the area’s institutions support everything from daily prayer to Nowruz celebrations, the Persian new year that for Iranian families marks the arrival of spring with the symbolic haft-sin table.
The Landmarks
Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center, 6170 Wilbur Avenue. The heart of Persian Jewish Tarzana. Established by Jews who left Iran after 1979, it runs daily prayer services, High Holiday programming, and social services that include support for struggling Persian Jewish families. It bills itself as the oldest Persian Jewish organisation in the state.
Beith David Educational Center, 18648 Clark Street. A non-profit Orthodox Sephardic synagogue whose congregation is largely Persian, led for many years by Rabbi Moshe Levihaim. It has served the area for more than three decades, combining worship with religious education for children and adults.
Shuva Israel Synagogue, Tarzana. One of several Sephardic congregations that grew alongside the Persian community in the neighbourhood, part of the dense web of small synagogues that lets families worship close to home rather than driving back to the Westside.
Orchid Grill & Kabob, 19649 Ventura Boulevard. A family-owned Persian restaurant on the boulevard since the mid-1990s, the kind of place where koobideh and chicken kabob over saffron rice anchor a menu of stews. It is one of the longest-running Persian kitchens in Tarzana.
Ayvana, 19647 Ventura Boulevard. A more contemporary Persian restaurant next door, with herb-rich stews, flame-grilled kababs, and a dining room built for family gatherings of fifty. It reflects a newer, polished generation of Iranian dining on the boulevard.
Sabzee Mediterranean Market, 17461 Ventura Boulevard, Encino. Just over the line in Encino, this Persian and Middle Eastern grocery is a staple for Tarzana families, stocking herbs, breads, and prepared kabobs and stews, with kosher options for the Jewish community.
Providence Tarzana Medical Center, 18321 Clark Street. The neighbourhood’s hospital and one of its largest employers, where many Iranian American doctors trained in the United States have practised, a marker of how thoroughly the second generation moved into the professions.
Where They Came From
The Persians of Tarzana come overwhelmingly from Iran’s cities. The Jewish families trace their roots to the historic communities of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Hamadan, some of the oldest continuous Jewish settlements anywhere, present in Persia since antiquity.
Their migration was not a slow trickle of individuals but the near-complete relocation of a community over a few decades, with 1979 as the hinge. Iranian Jews who once numbered in the tens of thousands inside Iran are now concentrated in greater Los Angeles, and Tarzana holds one of the larger Valley shares of them.
Alongside the Jewish community, Tarzana is home to Iranian Muslims, Armenians, and Baha’is, part of the wider Iranian diaspora that filled the Valley after the revolution. The neighbourhood’s Iranian ancestry runs around nine to ten percent, with Persian spoken in roughly one in six homes.
What ties them together is less a single shared faith than a shared point of departure and a shared language. The grandparents speak of Tehran and Shiraz with a specificity that only first-hand memory allows, while the youngest generation knows those cities mostly through food, holidays, and the Persian spoken at the dinner table. Tarzana is where that memory is kept warm.
Tarzana Today
Tarzana today is a neighbourhood where Persian life is woven into the ordinary. The synagogues fill on Shabbat, the markets stock fresh herbs and Persian sweets, and the restaurants on Ventura Boulevard serve the same dishes that families would recognise from Tehran.
It is also a community in transition. The generation that fled in 1979 is ageing, and their American-born grandchildren move fluidly between Persian tradition and Southern California life, many of them now scattered across the wider Valley and the Westside while still returning to Tarzana for the holidays, the synagogue, and the family table.
What endures is the sense of a place that was chosen and built. Tarzana was never an old-world enclave handed down through generations. It was an affluent Valley suburb that a displaced community adopted, furnished with its own institutions, and made permanently its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Persians in Tarzana?
The Persians in Tarzana are largely the families and descendants of Iranians, especially Iranian Jews, who fled the 1979 revolution and first settled on the Westside. As that community grew, many moved over the hill to the San Fernando Valley for larger homes, good schools, and more space, with Tarzana becoming one of the favoured destinations.
Are the Persians in Tarzana mostly Jewish?
A large share are Iranian Jews, and the neighbourhood’s most prominent Persian institutions are synagogues and Jewish cultural centres such as Eretz-SIAMAK. Tarzana is also home to Iranian Muslims, Armenians, and Baha’is, so the wider Iranian community is religiously mixed.
What is the Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center?
It is a Persian Jewish synagogue and cultural centre at 6170 Wilbur Avenue, founded by refugees of the 1979 revolution. It describes itself as the oldest Persian Jewish organisation in California and the largest in the San Fernando Valley, offering prayer services, social support, and cultural programming.
Where can I find Persian food in Tarzana?
Ventura Boulevard is the centre of Persian dining, with restaurants such as Orchid Grill & Kabob and Ayvana serving kabobs, stews, and saffron rice. Nearby in Encino, Sabzee Mediterranean Market sells Persian groceries and prepared dishes.
How affluent is Tarzana?
Very. The median home value sits above two million dollars, making Tarzana more expensive than the vast majority of neighbourhoods in California. That affluence is a large part of why the established Persian community settled here.
How does Tarzana relate to other Persian neighbourhoods in Los Angeles?
Tarzana is part of a chain of Persian centres that runs from Tehrangeles in Westwood through Beverly Hills and out into the Valley alongside Encino and Woodland Hills. Many families have ties across several of these places.
If your family’s story passed through Tarzana, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the synagogues of Tehran and Shiraz to a kabob house on Ventura Boulevard, to wherever you are now.