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Kabul, Afghanistan - The two men grew up in the same western city in Afghanistan and studied Hebrew in the same neighborhood.
Both of them live in the ruins of Kabul's only synagogue.
They claim to be the only Jews left in Kabul and possibly in all of Afghanistan.
And they hate each other.
The tale of Zbolon Simentov and Isaac Levy illustrates the damage more than two decades of war can inflict on a religious community. It also serves as a cautionary reminder of how easily greed and betrayal can take precedence over faith. Above all, it makes for a sorry ending to a small but important chapter in this troubled nation's history, that of the Jews who once flourished in this overwhelmingly Muslim country.
The only thing Simentov and Levy agree on is that they were driven apart by the ornate Torah that once graced the synagogue on Chicken Street in the heart of New City, a formerly bustling district of Kabul where as many as 100 Jewish families lived in the 1960s.
The gray-bearded Levy, who is 57 but looks 75, accuses Simentov of swiping the Torah a few years ago with the aim of selling it abroad. "I welcomed him into this synagogue when he had no place else to go because he was a fellow Jew and this is the thanks I get," Levy groused.
The bespectacled, roly-poly Simentov, who looks younger than his 41 years, initially countered that it was Levy who absconded with the sacred scroll written on deerskin and rolled around two silver cylinders. When Newsday confronted him with reports from three former Taliban government officials who said they'd seen the Torah in his possession after it vanished from the synagogue,...