AP Photo Iranian president tweets Rosh Hashanah greeting

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wished Jews a happy new year on Sunday, a notable contrast from the clerical regime's long history of anti-Semitic statements.

The tweet, which did not appear in Rouhani's Farsi account, according to the Associated Press, said “May our shared Abrahamic roots deepen respect & bring peace & mutual understanding. L'Shanah Tovah. #RoshHashanah.”


This was not the first time Rouhani has wished the Jewish people a happy new year.

“As the sun is about to set here in #Tehran I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah,” he tweeted in 2013. An estimated 9,000 Jews still live in Iran, down from more than 100,000 in the 1970s.

Rouhani's well wishes are a far cry from his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose inflammatory comments about Israel and outright denial of the Holocaust angered many.

Rouhani's conciliatory rhetoric helped provide a diplomatic opening for the recently concluded nuclear deal with six world powers. But he's only been willing to go so far in setting a different tone.

In 2013, when Ann Curry of NBC News asked Rouhani if he shared the views of Ahmadinejad and believed the Holocaust was a myth, he gave an awkward, stumbling answer. "I'm not a historian. I'm a politician," he said, according to The Washington Post. "What is important for us is that the people, the nations in our region should get closer to one another."

Later, he acknowledged the Holocaust existed but said again that he was no historian on discussing the scale of it.

"I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created toward the Jews, is reprehensible and condemnable," he said. "The dimensions of whatever it is the historians have to understand what it is.”

Rouhani's boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has a history of making inflammatory statements about Israel and Jews. Last week, Khamenei said that Israel would cease to exist within 25 years.