The Last Jew Standing In Afghanistan Celebrates Holiday

Yes, religious communities can vanish.

And not necessarily by planned persecutions, overworked gas ovens or unfeeling guards who put bullets into men, women and children including infants because they come from a different community or group.

It be by political attrition, too:

Zebulon Simentov, the last Jew in Afghanistan, is once again marking the Jewish holy day of fasting in solitude, in a deserted synagogue in the capital of a devoutly Islamic nation.

“I have everything I need for the 24 hours of praying and fasting,” Simentov tells AFP before the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at sunset on Friday.

Yes, today is the day of atonement, although there are many in public life who would really require a decade of atonement, since a day would never cover everything…

Around two decades ago, there were still about 20 Afghan Jewish families living in Kabul, although all were from Herat — the largest city in northwestern Afghanistan near the border with Iran.

Through the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the subsequent civil war and the Taliban’s 1996-2001 regime, all went to Israel or moved to neighbouring former Soviet republics — undoing a Jewish presence built up from the seventh century.

So there was no big design.

No big plan to shove the Jews out.

It just happened — leaving the loneliest Jew in Afghanistan:

Only Simentov has been left behind, becoming by default the guardian of Kabul’s empty synagogue.

The room where he receives visitors was once a prayer room for women. On the wall are pictures of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the late ultra-orthodox Lubavitch rabbi, Menahem Schneerson.

Adjoining this room is the bare-walled “small synagogue” for men, where he prefers to pray.

Simentov, approaching 50, dislikes the “big synagogue” across the corridor — another large and dirty room in which stands only a platform traditionally reserved for the rabbi.

A cupboard built into the wall faces Jerusalem. Its doors are open and it has been stripped of its treasure, a scroll of the Torah.

The precious document was stolen by a Taliban during the rule of the Islamist movement which was driven from government six years ago by a coalition led by the United States. /blockquote>

So a population is not really gone, just displaced.

And one remnant stays behind as a reminder of past days — good and bad…