The Last Jew in Kabul
The New York Times has a video up of the last Jew living in Kabul, Afghanistan, Zablon Simantov, in which he talks about his life there, why he stayed, and his relationship to the Taliban.
“The Taliban didn’t like Jews. They treated me very badly. But they didn’t like anyone. They treated everyone badly.”
He doesn’t mention his long feud with Ishaq Levin, the other Jew to remain in Kabul, who died in 2005. He shows the Flower Street Synagogue with the kind of detached sadness and nostalgia that fading Jewish communities everywhere seem to have, a mourning for the past he inherited that “dates back to the time of the Buddha”, and also a refusal to mourn it.
