Afghanistan’s final Jew leaves after Taliban takeover

The final member of Afghanistan’s Jewish group has left the nation.
Zebulon Simentov, who lived in a dilapidated synagogue in Kabul, stored kosher and prayed in Hebrew, endured a long time of conflict because the nation’s centuries-old Jewish group quickly dwindled. But the Taliban takeover final month appears to have been the final straw.

Moti Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman who runs a personal safety group that organized the evacuation, informed The Associated Press on Wednesday that the 62-year-old Simentov and 29 of his neighbours, practically all of them girls and youngsters, have been taken to a “neighbouring country.”
Kahana stated Simentov, who had lived below Taliban rule earlier than, was not fearful about them. But Kahana warned him that he was vulnerable to being kidnapped or killed by the much more radical Islamic State group. He stated Simentov’s neighbours additionally pressed him to depart, in order that their youngsters might be part of him on the bus out.
Israel’s Kan public broadcaster aired footage of the evacuation, displaying a bus full of individuals travelling throughout what gave the impression to be Afghanistan, with all of the faces blurred aside from Simentov’s.

They joined an exodus of tens of 1000’s of Afghans who’ve fled for the reason that Taliban swept throughout the nation final month. The US and its allies organized an enormous airlift within the closing days of the 20-year-war, however officers acknowledged that as much as 200 American residents, in addition to 1000’s of Afghans who had aided the conflict effort, had been left behind.
Kahana stated his group is reaching out to U.S. and Israeli authorities to discover a everlasting residence for Simentov, whose estranged spouse and youngsters dwell in Israel. For years, Simentov refused to grant his spouse a divorce below Jewish regulation, which might open him as much as authorized repercussions in Israel. Kahana stated he persuaded him to grant the divorce and has drawn up the paperwork.
“That was two weeks of being a shrink, a psychiatrist, talking to him like 10 times a day, and his neighbour at the same time to translate,” Kahana stated.

Hebrew manuscripts present in caves in northern Afghanistan point out a thriving Jewish group existed there a minimum of 1,000 years in the past. In the late nineteenth century, Afghanistan was residence to some 40,000 Jews, lots of them Persian Jews who had fled pressured conversion in neighbouring Iran. The group’s decline started with an exodus to Israel after its creation in 1948.
In an interview with The Associated Press in 2009, Simentov stated the final Jewish households left after the 1979 Soviet invasion.
For a number of years he shared the synagogue constructing with the nation’s solely different Jew, Isaak Levi, however they despised one another and feuded throughout the Taliban’s earlier rule from 1996 to 2001.

At one level, Levi accused Simentov of theft and spying. and Simentov countered by accusing Levi of renting rooms to prostitutes, an allegation he denied, The New York Times reported in 2002. The Taliban arrested each males and beat them, and so they confiscated the synagogue’s historical Torah scroll, which went lacking after the Taliban had been pushed from energy within the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
When his 80-year-old housemate died in 2005, Simentov stated he was completely happy to be rid of him.
Reporters who visited Simentov through the years — and paid the exorbitant charges he charged for interviews — discovered a portly man keen on whiskey, who stored a pet partridge and watched Afghan TV. He noticed Jewish dietary restrictions and ran a kebab store.
Born within the western metropolis of Herat in 1959, he all the time insisted Afghanistan was residence.
Samir Khan, a neighbour who runs a small grocery retailer and had recognized Simentov for the final 10 years, stated he disappeared a few week and a half in the past. Khan stated he solely discovered of Simentov’s departure when he noticed it on social media.
The Taliban, like different Islamic militant teams, are hostile to Israel however tolerated the nation’s miniscule Jewish group throughout their earlier reign. Aside from the feud, the one different time they got here knocking was after they observed that Muslim girls in all-encompassing burqas might usually be seen visiting Levi.
When they briefly arrested Levi, he defined that he had a enterprise promoting amulets to girls who needed to grow to be pregnant with sons or who had been against their husbands taking different wives, as allowed below Islamic regulation.
The Taliban launched him.