Tending A Waning Flame In Afghanistan,Vanni Cappelli

KABUL ? Flower Street and its continuation, Chicken Street, are by far the liveliest and most picturesque commercial thoroughfares in Kabul, a river of color flowing through a desert of destroyed or rundown buildings.

Zaboldan Simantov

This vibrant rainbow draws its hues from the nature of the goods sold here: fresh and canned groceries (many imported from Europe), pastries and flowers (of course) on Flower Street and a stunning variety of Afghan carpets, gemstones and antiques on Chicken Street.

Walking up this urban market garden shaded by gracefully leaning trees on a balmy blue summer?s day toward nearby Asmai Mountain, as diplomats joke with the shopkeepers and American soldiers test the action on the 19th century British Enfield rifles, it is easy to forget the tragedy that brought us all here in the first place, and the uncertainties of the struggle ahead.

With so much to command attention in this delightful oasis and the time allotted for escape from vastly more serious tasks so short, it is unlikely that many of the foreigners who have descended on Kabul since the Taliban were driven out pause to notice a long drab building covered with dirty white stucco on the right as one enters the foot of Flower Street. Its shattered windows, warped wooden door and lack of a sign on a street of stores makes it indistinguishable from the city?s countless other neglected or abandoned structures.

The only feature that could possibly catch the eye of a passerby is a large white terra cotta square set into the second story, decorated with endlessly repeated six-pointed stars. Although these are not Stars of David proper but more like starbursts , this is in fact Kabul?s only synagogue, and its caretaker is one of Afghanistan?s last Jews.

His name is Zaboldan Simantov, and he was born in the western city of Herat over forty years ago to a distinguished family prominent in commercial and public affairs.

?My uncle, Joseph Simantov, had a great name in Kabul in the time of King Zahir Shah and even as far back as the days of his father, King Nadir Shah,? he says proudly, with an upward wave of his hand, as he speaks through his translator, Niaz, the owner of a nearby curio shop who is a friend.<

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?He was a dealer in carpets, antiques and textiles who imported and exported with special commissions from His Majesty. I too made a living in that trade, until the disasters that overtook our country. It was the business of my family, a family that had been in Afghanistan since Buddhist times, before the coming of Islam.?

Mr. Simantov perhaps exaggerates the antiquity of his own family in Afghanistan, for Bukhara, a city with a strong and fabled Jewish community is known to be the center from which most Afghan Jews emigrated during the later Middle Ages.

But he is right about the Jewish presence in the country in general, for it was a very ancient branch of the Diaspora active on the Silk Road between Central Asia and India, as is evidenced by the discovery in the 1950?s of a medieval cemetery near the famous Minaret of Jam in the western province of Ghor.

An old apocryphal legend with wide currency in Afghanistan even posits a Hebrew origin for the country?s historically dominant Pashtun ethnicity, claiming they are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

And his description of his uncle?s career fits the pattern followed by the most prominent Afghan Jewish traders, who exported the country?s coveted handicrafts and imported textiles under the sponsorship of the Muslim ruling class.

?For a time, the Jews held an important economic position in Afghanistan,? Vartan Gregorian wrote in his seminal study The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, ?and, along with the Hindus, served as a major channel of contact between that country and Europe.?

What was it like to be a Jew in a land which has become synonymous with religious intolerance in the public mind ?

?Jewish people never had a problem with the government in Afghanistan down to the Soviet invasion,? he says firmly. ?You see how the royal family valued us. And with the common people, things were even better. Everyone in Flower Street and Chicken Street is my brother. There was never a problem over religion. We are all Afghans.?

Again Mr. Simantov paints a perhaps too rosy picture of the distant past, an inevitable result perhaps of the intensity of his own and his country?s suffering over the last quarter century.

Historically, non-Muslim minorities such as Jews, Hindus and Armenians did enjoy greater tolerance in Afghanistan than in surrounding countries, as is exemplified by the case of 600 Jews who were forcibly converted to Islam at Meshed in Iran in 1839; those who were able to later escape to Herat were allowed to resume their ancient faith.

But these ?cosmopolitan minorities? (to use Gregorian?s term) were also vulnerable to special discriminatory decrees during times of political turbulence ? decrees ranging from arbitrary restrictions on trade, dress, and movement to imposition of summary taxes.

This was half social scapegoating for political ends and half a function of a rising nationalism that, though it used a partly religious vocabulary, was not religious in origin.

Yet the harassment never involved any violence ? until the Taliban.

All Afghans suffered constantly because of the wars, but the Taliban treated us worst of all,?? he affirms. ?There were three break-ins and thefts at the synagogue under the Taliban; the last time, they took the Torah Scrolls. The authorities not only tolerated this, they encouraged it.?

And not satisfied with that, they arrested me three times. For what crime? Because I was a Jew, that was the crime.??

Mr. Simantov?s dual identity as an Afghan and a Jew is borne out by his dress and his comportment. A short, portly man, he wears the ubiquitous shalwar kameez (loose trousers and long shirt) of the region and a yarmulke.

Insistent on treating his visitor with the famed Afghan hospitality ? though he can only provide a boiled egg and some cucumbers ? he kisses a worn Torah written in Hebrew and printed in Jerusalem before handing it over for perusal.

His kindly demeanor does not at all suggest the rancor that has characterized his feud with another Kabul Jew, Isaac Levy, over various matters; a conflict that was dwelled upon in various news reports last spring to the neglect of the more fundamental story of the heritage of Judaism that lies sleeping on Flower Street.

?The synagogue is over eighty years old,? he continues, ?but there has not been a congregation here for a long time. The war and the Taliban destroyed their businesses and threatened their lives, so they fled.

?I have been to Israel and have considered emigrating, but someone must tend this holy place, desolate as it is. I am desperately looking for financial help to make repairs to the sanctuary and enable me to live. I am barely getting by as it is.?

A tour around the building bears out this description. Like so many older Afghan houses, it faces inward away from the street and clusters around a central garden, the three sides of the structure being squared off in this case by a high wall that encloses the trees and shrubs.

Though obviously struggling amidst a sandy, barely watered space, the vegetation is tall enough to lend a cool green feel to an otherwise worn and grimy environment, a sensation complemented by the blue metal railing that secures an interior balcony overlooking the garden decorated with interlocking Stars of David ? proper ones, this time.

The bright spots stop there, for the rest of the scene is indeed one of utter desolation, all too much the norm in Kabul. Thick layers of sand ? the result of the summer sandstorms for which the city is infamous ? blowing in through the shattered windows cover everything in both the larger and smaller sanctuaries.

The decor, spartan to begin with and consisting mainly of framed inscriptions in Hebrew, is dirty and faded. In a corner of the garden the mikvah, the ritual bath for women, stands roofless, hit by a rocket during the civil war, a fratricidal conflict fought here around the slopes of Asmai, a mountain named for the Hindu Great Mother goddess.

And yet, despite its state, the place is pervaded by a deep sense of peace, the aura of places considered holy that have passed through destruction.

It is the same feeling one gets standing before the Mullah Mahmoud Mosque, another shattered and empty place of worship that also faces a surviving garden amidst the total desolation of the old quarter of Kabul.

Or before the deep recesses where the Buddhas of Bamyan, destroyed by the Taliban, once stood, now rendered ever more mystical by their very absence.

Or before the pregnant immensity of Ground Zero, like all of these places a monument become ever more numinous by its mute eloquence against the blind brutality of fanaticism.

Vanni Cappelli is a freelance journalist from New York whose acquaintance with Afghanistan goes back to the early days of the Soviet invasion.

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Tending A Waning Flame In Afghanistan , Vanni Cappelli