A world-class Iranian chess referee who made headlines after announcing she would not return home following an international championship as she no longer wanted to keep her hair covered with a hijab, has revealed that she has Jewish roots.
Shoreh Bayat, 33, told the Telegraph newspaper that she kept her heritage hidden all her life while in Iran, but this year, as she waits for asylum in Britain, was able to celebrate her first Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year.
“All my life was about showing a fake image of myself to society because they wanted me to be an image of a religious Muslim woman, which I wasn’t,” she told the paper from her temporary home outside London at the family of a chess player friend.
Bayat, one of the top chess referees in the world, was born in northern Iran and said it was her father who encouraged her to take up chess at the age of nine. By age 12 she was a national champion in Iran, where chess is a state-sponsored sport. She went on to became general-secretary of the Iran Chess Federation, as well as becoming Asia’s first top-level chess arbiter.
But there was part of her family’s history that she kept hidden from Iranian authorities. Her paternal grandmother, Mary, was Jewish, arriving in Iran from Baku in Azerbaijan during World War II.
“If they knew that I had a Jewish background, I would never ever be general-secretary of the Iranian Chess Federation,” she said and recalled that she had heard anti-Semitic remarks from chess officials.
