The last Jew in Afghanistan, Zabulon Simantov, has left the country and is now en route to the United States.
Simantov, 62, born in the western Afghanistan city of Herat, is also a divorce-refuser who refuses to grant his estranged wife living in Israel a bill of divorce.
Several days ago he left his home in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and was taken by bus along with close to 30 other Afghans fleeing the country, mostly women and children, to a border crossing with an unnamed neighboring country, KAN News reported.
Despite the recent takeover of Afghanistan by the extremist Taliban movement, Simantov had refused to leave the country and had said he was not worried by the new regime.
In recent days however, he became increasingly concerned by the threat to his life from the Afghan branch of Islamic State and other terrorist groups, and finally decided to leave.
Over the last few weeks, Moshe Margaretten, a prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, and Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana attempted to convince Simantov to leave the country and facilitated his departure, although Simantov initially refused.
Over the last few days he completed his journey to a border crossing and is now in neighboring Tajikistan before continuing on his way to the US.
“I think what changed his mind is that his neighbors told him ‘Leave and take our children with you because our children are in danger,’” Kahana told KAN News.
“He said to me very clearly, ‘Save my life, get me out.’ That’s what he asked for so that’s what we did,” said Kahana.
Kahana said that once in New York he thinks Simantov will wish to eventually go to Israel, although he would face various sanctions from rabbinical courts in Israel unless he grants his wife a divorce.
Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, chairman of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States, said that he together with Kahana and others told Simantov that a precondition for their assistance in extracting him from Afghanistan was that he agree to grant his wife a divorce, which Chitrik says Simantov agreed to.
The Jewish community in Afghanistan dates back over 1,000 years and numbered some 4,000 people, mainly in the cities of Kabul, Herat and Balkh at the beginning of the 20th century, according to the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
Most of the country’s Jews left in the 1950s following the establishment of the State of Israel, although several families remained until the 1990s but fled severe violence and the civil war there.