Last 2Jews in Kabul fight like cat&dog

[Guest guest]

The last two Jews in Kabul fight like cat and dog

By Marcus Warren

(Filed: 04/12/2001)

 

 

AFGHANISTAN has suffered more than its fair share of feuding, but

few of its vendettas have seemed quite so pointless to outsiders as

that being fought by the last two Jews in Kabul.

 

Yitzhak Levy, 60, and Zebolan Simanto, 41, live in the same

courtyard on the same city street. Each looks after his own

synagogue, from which the other is banned.

 

Apart from being Jewish, all that they have in common is their

explosive hatred for one another. Even living as Jews together under

the Taliban did not reconcile them. If anything, it only offered

them new opportunities to denounce, inform on, terrorise and

generally do each other down.

 

"He is an old fool whose brains do not work properly," Mr Simanto

said of his enemy yesterday. "He is a donkey who thinks only of

himself. I wouldn't go into his flat if I were you: it stinks."

 

Mr Levy was equally vituperative about his rival and nemesis. "He is

arrogant and ruthless," he said. "He is making my life a misery."

Nothing is sacred in the campaign of spite and loathing the men have

waged against each other for the past three years. On at least one

occasion they came to blows in one of the synagogues.

 

"Yes, I knocked him down, with my fist, right here," Mr Simanto

smirked during a tour of his synagogue. "He had sneaked in and was

eavesdropping on my conversations."

 

Mr Levy complained that his enemy had punched him. But during an

interview yesterday he seemed more concerned about Mr Simanto's

overhearing him.

 

Three times he burst into the corridor outside his home to check

that we were alone. The casus belli has been the last Torah - a

scroll containing the Pentateuch - belonging to the last Jews in the

Afghan capital. It is a 500-year-old masterpiece handwritten on deer

hide and worth £1.3 million - or so the two men believe.

 

Both claim ownership of the scroll, but neither is likely to lay his

hands on it soon. The dispute between the men grew so intractable

that the Taliban confiscated the Torah and hid it in the vaults of

the interior ministry.

 

Worse, both men were thrown into jail, where for eight hellish days

they were forced to share a cell with several bemused Afghan Muslims

looking on. Spells in prison were a regular hazard for the men

during the Taliban era.

 

But neither accuses the Taliban of persecuting them for their faith.

They blame each other for ending up behind bars. "He told the

Taliban that I was an Israeli agent," said Mr Levy, a frail figure

in an astrakhan hat. "They arrested me and beat me up. It was all

his fault."

 

Mr Simanto, who favours a white skullcap, said: "He was always going

to the Taliban to inform on me. He accused me of trying to smuggle

the Torah to Israel." The suggestion that the two men, the last

survivors of a community based in Afghanistan for 800 years, should

have settled their differences for the sake of their religion is met

with scorn.

 

Both have family in Israel but neither is in a rush to emigrate,

afraid that the other will take over the courtyard and lay claim to

the Torah in his absence.

 

While the block's sole residents continue squabbling, the two

synagogues on the top floor, one for each of them, are covered with

dust, their fittings and furniture slowly falling apart. The men's

most recent quarrel concerns Mr Levy's supposed conversion to Islam,

an allegation made by Mr Simanto but which Mr Levy hotly denies.

 

Even Mr Levy's wife, in Israel with their five children for the past

15 years, has been embroiled in the controversy over her husband's

faith. "He wrote a letter to my wife in Beersheba and told her that

I was now a Muslim," a distraught Mr Levy alleged. "Now she wants a

divorce."