He’s lived in the country through decades of civil war and invasions from the world’s superpowers, but the threat of the radical Islamic State proved to be too much for the last Jew in Afghanistan. Sixty-two year old Zebulon Simentov has left the country, the Associated Press reports.
Living in a run-down synagogue in Kabul, Semintov kept kosher and prayed in Hebrew. He lived there through the Soviet invasion, the lengthy civil war, the American occupation and the subsequent takeover by the Taliban. While he didn’t fear the Taliban, an Israeli-American businessman who paid for Semintov’s evacuation convinced him to leave the country due to the threat from ISIS.
Semintov climbed aboard a bus that also held 29 of his neighbors, mostly women and children, and headed to an undisclosed neighboring country. The businessman, Moti Kahana, is trying to find a country that will take Semintov in as a refugee. He may not be eligible to travel to Israel because he has refused to grant his wife a divorce, a violation of Jewish law.
There has been a Jewish community in Afghanistan for more than a millenium. More than 40,000 Jews were documented to live in the country into the late 19th Century, but the last documented Jewish family left Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.