Monday, October 18, 2021
Via Turkey to Israel
Last Jew in Afghanistan to leave his country
Sabolon Simantow was born in 1959 into a still existing Jewish community in Afghanistan. Decades later, he is considered the last remaining Jew in the whole country. His own family emigrated to Israel in the 1990s, when the Taliban ruled before. Now he follows them.
According to media reports, the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan has left his country and is now in Turkey. Turkish media reported that he arrived in Istanbul on Sunday and initially received a 90-day visa. According to the Jerusalem Post, he will expected in Israel in the next few days.
Sabolon Simantow was the last representative of the Jewish community to gain prominence in Afghanistan. He lived alone in the only synagogue in Kabul and watched over it. Despite the troubled times, he never wanted to give up his post. “I will never leave this place,” he said in an interview in Kabul in 2008. What motivated him to leave Afghanistan is not yet known. In mid-August, the militant Islamist Taliban took power in Afghanistan.
Simantov’s wife, who, according to the Israeli media, has meanwhile divorced, emigrated to Israel with their two daughters in the 1990s. They were afraid of the unsafe situation in the country, Simantow said in an interview at the time. The regime of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, was the worst.
The Austrian journalist Emran Feroz had already reported on Simantov’s departure from his home country in September. He also wrote over a piece a few years ago the mysterious disappearance of the Torah from the synagogue in Kabul, over which Simantow was watching. This happened in the 1990s during the first Taliban rule.
Simantow was born in Herat in 1959. At that time, a relatively large number of Jews still lived in the western Afghan city. Over the years, however, their number decreased, and more and more of them emigrated to Israel or the USA. In Afghanistan, as in Turkey, 99 percent of the population is Muslim.