The Exodus of Jews from the Muslim World
Sept 26, 2021 15:34:46 GMT -5
Post by Berean on Sept 26, 2021 15:34:46 GMT -5
September 26, 2021
The Exodus of Jews from the Muslim World
By Michael Curtis
Overlooked the news of the chaos in Kabul is the story of the exit from Afghanistan on September 7, 2021, of 62-year-old Zabulon Simintov, the last Jew in the country. Not a heroic figure, he is a difficult man who has debts, received food, including matzos, from Afghans in New York and elsewhere, and was unkind to his wife who lives in Israel, because he refuses to grant her a get, the Jewish religious divorce process. He had some saving grace: he did save both the Afghan women’s soccer team and a group of women judges.
Simintov lived in and took care of the Kabul synagogue, lived for a time in Turkmenistan, and lived under the Taliban without problems, but he is afraid of the more extreme terrorist group, ISIS. He is an unusual person, a carpet trader and restauranteur who was born in Herat in 1959, keeps kosher, observes the Sabbath, reads the Torah, prays in Hebrew, is fond of whiskey, and keeps a pet partridge. He was taken out of Afghanistan by bus to a neighboring country, Tajikistan, with the help of an ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn man and an Israeli-U.S. businessman. The group also brought out 30 women and children.
Simintov is unimportant in himself but he represents a historic moment, the last person of the Jewish population that had been in Afghanistan for 2000 years, living as merchants, landowners, and moneylenders. In the city of Herat, there were four synagogues. Anti-Semitism became more evident in the 1930s. Jews were declared non-citizens and began emigrating. In 1948 there were 5,000, but by 2005 there were only two Jews left: Simintov and Isaac Levy, who died in 2005. They disliked each other and lived in opposite sides in the synagogue.
The departure of Simintov is a reminder of the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, still observed in the Jewish festivals at Passover and at Sukkot, the festival for giving thanks not only for the yearly harvest but also for food and shelter when escaping from Egypt.
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