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Home Alone with the Taliban
Tasgola Karla Bruner
Afghanistan's last rabbi wants to join his family in Israel, but not without a Torah scroll that cost him 40 days in jail
The synagogue is empty now, with dust on the shelves and onions on the floor. Old bar mitzvah photographs are strewn about and the winter cold blows in through broken windows. The walls are peeling. The faithful are long gone, but their rabbi is still here. Yitzhak Levi has lost the sight in one eye and suffers from heart problems. He cooks in his bedroom, a small, dark place of musty smells and heaps of clothing, and survives through the compassion of friends and strangers.
Levi, with his white beard and astrakhan hat, is the last Jew still living in Afghanistan, the remnant of a small community that once thrived alongside its Muslim neighbors. Over the past 20 years, the landlocked country has been ravaged by poverty and war. Most of the 70 or 80 Jewish families left after the Soviet invasion in 1979, but Levi stayed on, even after the Soviets retreated a decade later.
The Soviet departure was followed by an outbreak of factional fighting between mujahedin guerrilla groups that turned on each other, creating an atmosphere of lawlessness and reducing Kabul to rubble. The capital, surrounded by three mountain ranges, is estimated to have 45,000 war widows, silent, ghostly figures in their all-concealing burqa veils, who support an average of six children each. They sit on the sidewalks, their children by their sides, begging. The wide, tree-lined boulevards famed in the 1970s for their boutiques, restaurants and jazz clubs, are now quiet, except for passing taxis and bicycles. Government offices close at 1 p.m.
The last half-dozen Jewish families left during the guerrilla clashes, but again not Levi, even after his wife, four sons and a daughter departed for Israel about eight years ago. He is still here, living under the rule of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic movement that took power three years ago.
Many people have questioned the lucidity of a Jewish man who stays in a country that is governed by what the international community considers the most repressive Islamic regime on the planet, one that requires beards for men, tent-like veils for women, amputates thieves' feet and hands, bans education and employment for the vast majority of women, and music, films, and photography for everybody.
Afghanistan, where the first snows have fallen and the average daily temperature is down to minus 2.8 degrees C (28 degrees F), is still his home, Levi insists, even if he sometimes feels a stranger in it. Jews came to Afghanistan from its western neighbor Iran, about 200 years ago. They included his ancestors, who settled in Herat in the western part of this untamed land, where Levi was born. The family later moved to Kabul.
"I'm a citizen of Afghanistan, but I'm Jewish," says Levi, who looks older than his 59 years. He knows that he could have a better life elsewhere, but says he has stayed to watch over the compound where he lives - which includes the synagogue, where he stores his vegetables. "Half of this compound belongs to other Jews," he says. "The other half was my grandfather's. I'm still living here to take care of the synagogue, the Torah scroll and other holy books."
But he is concerned about his future. "If I die here no one will take care of me and there will be no one to bury me," he says. Levi admits he is "sick" about not being with his family, now living in Beersheba, but says his wife and children can't afford to get him to Israel. "The Israeli government, or United Nations, is rich enough," he suggests. "They can take me out of here."
After his family left, an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Kabul, offered to help get him and his books to Israel. But the official was transferred before he could do anything. The present deputy head of the Red Cross delegation here, Christophe Luedi, says there are many people in Israel and other countries who have offered to assist Levi and pay for his transportation out of Afghanistan and on to an international flight from neighboring Pakistan. "He changes his opinions a lot," Luedi reports.
Still, the Red Cross has helped Levi exchange messages with his family. "The family is ready to receive him, as far as I know," Luedi says, "but there are religious-related issues. He is very much concerned about leaving the synagogue behind. The ICRC can't just put him on a plane and take him out. We may have trouble with the authorities. It's very sensitive. We're trying to deal with him as a simple family reunion case. If ICRC gets involved with getting Jews out, it could be very touchy."
Right now, Levi seems more concerned about a rivalry that is brewing between him and a recent arrival, another Afghan Jew who came to Kabul a year ago after living in the former Soviet Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. Levi accuses Zbolon Semantou, a 46-year-old carpet dealer, of stealing the Torah from the synagogue and making trouble for him with the Taliban, who jailed him for 40 days and confiscated the disputed scroll from Semantou. While he was in jail, Levi says, the Taliban forced him to recite Koranic texts and convert to Islam, but he confides: "I haven't really changed my faith. I'm still Jewish."
Semantou, a short, plump, round-faced man with a beard and tinted glasses, denies Levi's charges. "The Israeli government sent me to take care of this old man, to help him," he says, "but he told the Taliban that I'm spying for Israel." Semantou, whose wife lives in Israel, declines to say which part of the Israeli government sent him. Pressed for an answer, he says simply: "The chiefs of the Jewish people."
He protests: "I just came here for one or two months, to take care of the Torah, but Yitzhak made obstacles for me and I've been here for one year. That old man was finding women for prostitution. I took the Torah to my room because he's a polluted person, but he told the Taliban and now the Torah is in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."
Levi claims the Muslim women came to him to have their palms read, or to get potions to guarantee them a son or dissuade a husband from marrying a second wife. Although a friend says Levi doesn't really want to leave, he insists that he does. "Each hour that passes is like a year because my family is not here," says the last rabbi of Kabul. "I am ready to leave this place. I have nothing else. I want to go."
2000
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |