Last living Jew in Afghanistan leaves country after Taliban takeover
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Last living Jew in Afghanistan leaves country after Taliban takeover

Zebulon Simentov, 62, fears he might be kidnapped or killed by the Islamic State. Simentov and 29 of his neighbours have been taken to a 'neighbouring country'.

Tenzin Zompa    

File photo of Zebulon Zebulon Simentov | Wikimedia commons

New Delhi: The last living member of Afghanistan’s Jewish community has left the country after the Taliban takeover.

62-year-old Zebulon Simentov, who has long called Afghanistan his home, left the country last week due to the fear of being kidnapped or killed by the Islamic State group.

Moti Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman who runs a private security group that has been involved in evacuating people from Afghanistan, told The Associated Press Wednesday that Simentov and 29 of his neighbours, most of them women and children, have been taken to a “neighbouring country”.

“His problem isn’t the Taliban, but Islamic State, al-Qaeda. In his case, it’s the other crazies that emerge each day now. He fears them,” Kahana told Israeli news channel Kan news.

A video of them leaving Afghanistan was also aired by Kan news, which showed a bus full of people travelling through the barren landscapes and crossing various checkpoints.

Simentov and others safely reached the neighbouring country over the weekend and are most likely to be taken to the United States from there, according to a report in The Times of Israel.

Their evacuation was funded by Moshe Margaretten, who has helped rescue dozens of Afghans amid the Taliban takeover.

“Moshe Margaretten please take me to New York with God’s help,” Simantov can be heard saying in the video.

 

 

The only Jew in Afghanistan

Simentov was the only living Jew in Afghanistan after his partner Isaak Levi died in 2005, with whom he shared and looked after the dilapidated synagogue in Kabul.

Born in the western city of Herat in 1959, Simentov always called Afghanistan his homeland. According to reports, he charged “exorbitant fees” for interviews with reporters and ran a kebab shop in Kabul.

Simentov told The Associated Press in 2009 that the last Jewish families left Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion.

Jews in Afghanistan

Afghanistan was home to around 40,000 jews in the late 19th century, many of them Persian Jews who had fled forced conversion in neighbouring Iran.

Their number saw a rapid decline as the majority of them went to settle in Israel after its creation in 1948.

According to a report in The New York Times, the exodus of the Afghan Jews gathered pace during the mujahideen wars in the early 1990s, and when the Taliban seized control in 1996, only five Jewish families were left in Kabul.

While the Taliban are hostile to Israel, they have done no harm to the country’s tiny Jewish community during their previous reign from 1990 to 2001. The group’s spokesperson Suhail Shaheen had even vowed “to respect the rights of minorities in Afghanistan, including those of the country’s last Jew”.

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