New Delhi: The last living Jew in Afghanistan has refused to leave the country even after the Taliban took over last week, to avoid divorcing his wife of over 20 years.
Zabulon Simintov, the 62-year-old caretaker of the only synagogue in Afghanistan, had earlier indicated that he wished to leave the country before the Taliban took over.
In an interview to AFP, earlier this year, Simintov had said: “I’m the last, the only Jew in Afghanistan… It could get worse for me here. I have decided to leave for Israel if the Taliban returns.”
A private plane was also chartered to ferry him out to Israel by Moti Kahana, an Israel-American businessman. However, the Jew suddenly changed his mind.
Prior to agreeing to being evacuated, Simintov had also reportedly asked for “personal financing”, which Kahana had refused.
“I’m not paying Jews to save their own lives. I’m here to help. I’m not here to pay you to save your life,” Kahana told Haaretz.
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Divorce saga
According to a report in The Times of Israel, Simintov probably stayed back in Afghanistan to avoid jail time in Israel since he has consistently refused to divorce his wife.
His wife and daughters had moved to Israel in 1998 and since then, Simintov has not granted her a divorce, known as ‘get’ in Hebrew.
The rabbinic bill of divorce (get) is needed by women to be able to remarry and women whose husbands refuse to grant them get are called “agunot” (chained women), which is a major contention of gender inequality in Orthodox Judaism. In Israel, such spouses can face jail time.
According to Kahana, American officials had informed him that when US had brought in a rabbi to Kabul to help Simintov divorce his wife earlier, through video conferencing, he “didn’t show up”.
“We tried with Amie FR, correspondent in Kabul, to get him to agree to write a Get and I was ready to fly to Kabul to administer it. But, even after Amie offered a case of single malt scotch, the man refused,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Conference of European Rabbis, said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, in an interview with WION, Simintov said that he has refused to flee from Afghanistan and decided to live there to look after the last standing synagogue.
Simintov was born in the city of Herat which was home to Jews decades ago and had in between left for Tajikistan in 1992 only to return to Kabul. He continues to live in the synagogue.
Yitzhak Levi, the other Jew had died in 2005 but the two didn’t get along and had a history of making accusations against one another to the Taliban.
(Edited by Rachel John)
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