Posted on 12/04/2001 2:44:11 AM PST by Arkle
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."
If so, Jerry Stiller ('George Costanza’s' father 'Frank' on Seinfeld) should be tapped to play Levy.
Who would be the actors?
VRN
As for the casting, it's a shame Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are gone. Jerry Stiller would be great though. "Serenity now!!"
There was an article on these two guys about a year ago. Seems nothing has changed.
This is too good, it has to be made into a movie.
Alas
"From My Jewish friend.
xxxxx, believe it or not, I read that story in a Jewish publication a yearor more ago, and I'm not certain I even knew where Kabul was located at the time.
I think one of the parties has died since, and the other party stated, "I wish my enemy would have outlived me because NOW there is no one here to properly bury me as a Jew!" "
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