Zablon Simintov is one-man Jewish community —not just in the city of Kabul, but for the entire country of Afghanistan:
Zablon Simintov is always guaranteed the best seat in his local synagogue here, but the privilege comes with a downside: he’s the last Jew in Afghanistan.
The country’s 800-year-old Jewish community — an estimated 40,000 strong at its peak — is now a party of one.
But Simintov, for his part, isn’t going anywhere soon. For more than a decade, he has refused to join his wife and two teenage daughters in Israel.
“My family call me all the time and say, ‘Come here, you’re the last Jew in Afghanistan, what are you doing there?’ ” he says.
Simintov, a former carpet dealer, refuses to answer that question. “I don’t know why I’m still living here,” he says. “It’s God’s will.”
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
