For years, Zebulon Simentov was known as the “last Jew of Afghanistan,” the sole remnant of a centuries-old community holding court in Kabul’s only remaining synagogue. He left the country last month for Istanbul after the Taliban seized power. Now it appears he was not the last one. Simentov’s distant cousin, Tova Moradi, was born and raised in Kabul and lived there until last week, more than a month after Simentov departed in September. Fearing for their safety, Moradi, her children and nearly two dozen grandchildren fled the country in recent weeks in an escape orchestrated by an Israeli aid group, activists and prominent Jewish philanthropists. “I loved my country, loved it very much, but had to leave because my children were in danger,” Moradi told The Associated Press from her modest quarters in the Albanian town of Golem, whose beachside resorts have been converted to makeshift homes for some 2,000 Afghan refugees. Moradi, 83, was one of 10 children born to a Jewish family in Kabul. At age 16, she ran away from home and married a Muslim man. She never converted to Islam, maintained some Jewish traditions, and it was no secret in her neighborhood that she was Jewish. “She never denied her Judaism, she just got married in order to save her life as you cannot be safe as a young girl in Afghanistan,” Moradi’s daughter, Khorshid, told the AP from her home in Canada, where she and three of her siblings moved after the Taliban first seized power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Despite friction over her decision to marry outside the faith, Moradi said she stayed in touch with some of her family over the years. Her parents and siblings fled Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1980s. Her parents are buried at Jerusalem’s Har Menuhot cemetery, and many of her surviving siblings and their descendants live in Israel. But until this week, she had not spoken to some of her sisters in over half a century. “Yesterday, I saw my sisters, nieces and nephews after around 60 years through a video call. We spoke for hours,” Moradi said. “I was really happy, I saw their children and they met mine.” “They said ‘it’s like she came back from the grave,’” Khorshid said. During the first period of Taliban rule, from 1996 until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Moradi tried to maintain a low profile. But she risked her life by hiding Rabbi Isaak Levi, one of the few remaining Afghan Jews, from the Taliban. Levi and Simentov lived together for years in the decrepit synagogue in Kabul but famously despised one another and fought often. The Taliban usually left them alone, but intervened during one such dispute, arresting them, beating them and confiscating the synagogue’s ancient Torah scroll, which went missing after the Taliban were driven from power. “Isaak came to our home during the Taliban and we hid him for a month,” Moradi said, as her grandson assisted her in retelling the story. They said when the Taliban came looking for him they said he was a Muslim. She made preparations to smuggle the rabbi out of the country, but his health degraded and he died in 2005. Levi’s remains were flown to Israel for burial, and Moradi has kept his old passport as a […]
The post Woman Now Thought To Be Afghanistan’s Last Jew Flees Country appeared first on The Yeshiva World.