Last Jew leaves with neighbours
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—The last member of Afghanistan’s Jewish community has left the country.
Zebulon Simentov, who lived in a dilapidated synagogue in Kabul, kept kosher and prayed in Hebrew, endured decades of war as the country’s centuries-old Jewish community rapidly dwindled. But the Taliban takeover last month seems to have been the last straw.
Moti Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman who runs a private security group that organized the evacuation, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the 62-year-old Simentov and 29 of his neighbours, nearly all of them women and children, have been taken to a “neighbouring country.”
Kahana said Simentov, who had lived under Taliban rule before, was not worried about them. But Kahana warned him that he was at risk of being kidnapped or killed by the far more radical Islamic State group. He said Simentov’s neighbours also pressed him to leave, so that their children could join him on the bus out.
Israel’s Kan public broadcaster aired footage of the evacuation, showing a bus full of people travelling across what appeared to be Afghanistan, with all the faces blurred except for Simentov’s.
They joined an exodus of tens of thousands of Afghans who have fled since the Taliban swept across the country last month. The U.S. and its allies organized a massive airlift in the closing days of the 20year-war, but officials acknowledged that up to 200 American citizens, as well as thousands of Afghans who had aided the war effort, were left behind.
Kahana said his group is reaching out to U.S. and Israeli authorities to find a permanent home for Simentov, whose estranged wife and children live in Israel. For years, Simentov refused to grant his wife a divorce under Jewish law, which could open him up to legal repercussions in Israel. Kahana said 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 said.
Hebrew manuscripts found in caves in northern Afghanistan indicate a thriving Jewish community existed there at least 1,000 years ago. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan was home to some 40,000 Jews, many of them Persians who had fled forced conversion in neighbouring Iran.
In an interview with The Associated Press in 2009, Simentov said the last Jewish families left after the 1979 Soviet invasion.
For several years he shared the synagogue building with the country’s only other Jew, Isaak Levi, but they despised each other and feuded during the Taliban’s previous rule from 1996 to 2001.