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Israel: At One with the Taliban
Mitchell Ginsburg
At first it was funny. The last two Jews in Afghanistan were living in a land ravaged by war and ruled by the most oppressive regime in the world, and they weren�t speaking. Yitzhak Levi, a 62-year-old native of Herat, in the west of the country, had accused Zbolon Semantou, a 50-year-old newcomer from Turkmenistan, to the north, of stealing the Torah from the country�s sole synagogue. Semantou had retorted that he was removing the holy scroll from an unholy place, a place where Levi lived and where, according to Semantou, he was running a prostitution ring. As a result of the feud, Levi spent 40 days in a Taliban jail cell.
But now, as a fuller picture of the men�s private lives develops, it grows sad. The men are not in Afghanistan to safeguard the synagogue. They�re running from their wives, their children and their alimony debts. Levi has been estranged from his 57-year-old wife and eight children in Israel for over 15 years; Semantou�s wife, Lenna Musayeev, mother to his two young daughters, aged 8 and 9, told The Report that she hasn�t seen him in five years and he hasn�t paid her a dime in nearly 10.
Musayeev, 35, met me in a public park in Holon. Seeing her house, she said, was out of the question. She was willing to expose her story, but not her poverty. She lives with her two daughters, her father, her mother and three adult siblings. She and her daughters share a room. Her father collects discarded furniture and tries to sell it. It wasn�t always like this.
Musayeev, who has long brown hair and earnest brown eyes, remembers Turkmenistan fondly. A music student in those days, she sang, she danced, she lived in her father�s spacious house. But when she was 25, her father decided he had waited too long for her to marry. He chose Zbolon Semantou, a traveling salesman 15 years her senior, as her mate. Musayeev immediately despaired. "He was old and very pious; he didn�t like music or art, and I could tell that he was closed inside," she says pointing at her heart.
Mostly, though, Semantou was on the road, in Afghanistan as well as Turkmenistan. He sold carpets and antiques. He was away when his first child was born. (He didn�t see her until she was 3 months old.) One year later, when his wife was pregnant again, he demanded she abort the pregnancy, despite his piety. She refused. The following year she came to Israel with her family. Semantou did not join her, but, she says, it was implicit that he would follow. He didn�t.
His wife, therefore, is relegated to the status of an agunah -- chained to her husband until he sets her free with a religious writ of divorce.
Both she and Levi�s wife, who prefers to remain anonymous and allow Rabbi Yitzhak Dahan, secretary of the rabbinical court in Beersheba, to speak for her, want divorces. But Jewish law -- which dictates all matters of marriage and divorce in Israel -- requires the husband�s consent. Neither man has been forthcoming.
"By law neither of these woman are entitled to alimony or any of the other rights of a divorc�e," says Rachel Levmore, the sole female staffer at the Israeli rabbinical court. Working for the court�s agunah unit, Levmore is in charge of tracking down recalcitrant spouses overseas. "And if they were to have a child [by another man]," Levmore continues, "it would be a mamzer, ineligible for marriage in the State of Israel."
Mavoi Satum (Dead End), a lobby and support group for agunot in Israel, estimates that there are close to 1,000 women in this country whose husbands refuse to divorce them. (In contrast to Musayeev and the wife of Yitzhak Levi, whose husbands are beyond the reach of Israeli law, these women are entitled to �temporary� support payments from their husbands -- which are maintained for so long as their cases remained unresolved.) Many, according to Debbi Perla, the executive director of the organization, are being physically, emotionally and sexually abused by their husbands. In principle, the rabbinic courts have the legal authority to apply various kinds of pressure on husbands to grant divorces -- assuming they�re in Israel. One man, the record holder as it were, sat 38 years in jail rather than grant his wife a divorce, finally dying behind bars.
The potential for such a situation, says Levmore, is a result of Israel�s strange legal system, which puts divorce in the hands of rabbinic courts -- and then imposes modern restrictions on those courts. "In my work," she says, "I straddle the hyphen between the �Jewish� and the �democratic� in Israel. In the past, a rabbinical court would have solved these types of problems according to, say, Maimonides� writings -- you flog him until he says, �I want to.� Now the most we can do is put him in jail."
But even that threat is useless when the husband cannot be pressured -- if, for instance, he�s in Kabul.
Rabbi Dahan has tried, through visitors to the Afghan capital, to get Levi to free his wife. In response, Levi has said he wants to come to Israel and is willing to grant a divorce -- but Dahan says he changes his story with the wind.
Dahan has used numerous strategies to get Levi to sign a get. Last year, in a halakhically lenient and controversial gesture, he asked an Israeli journalist covering the American invasion of Afghanistan to set up a video conference with Levi. The idea was that Dahan, from Jerusalem, would preside over the get procedure. Levi never showed.
Next, Dahan obtained a rabbinical ruling to allow Levi to give his consent over the phone. When that didn�t work, he contacted the U.S. chaplaincy corps in Afghanistan, which sent an Orthodox rabbi and Jewish witnesses to Levi to draft the get. Dahan hoped the sight of uniforms would frighten Levy into agreeing -- and indeed, Levi said yes. But by the next day, Levi had changed his mind.
Dahan even offered to raise money for Levi�s trip to Israel. "Every time we make headway, he changes his requirements. Maybe he loves the synagogue more than his wife," Dahan says.
As for Semantou, his wife says he used to visit here -- she even confronted him once at his mother�s home in Holon in the mid-90s. But since then he has stayed away. Dahan believes he lacks the funds to return to Israel -- and is trying to leverage his power over his wife in order to extort the cash to airlift his belongings.
But his wife doesn�t think Semantou will ever come. She says her husband -- "if you can call a man like that husband" -- has 10 different sets of identity papers and that a man who opted to miss his mother�s funeral in Israel is less than likely to agree to come for the price of an airlift.
Her daughters, who pick up discarded bottles at school for the cash refund and who are not allowed to have friends over to the house or go to other houses, pine for their father. "But all he does all day is study Torah," says Musayeev, adding pointedly: "I wonder what, exactly, it says in that Torah."
Israel
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