AFGHANISTAN: The last two Jews in Afghanistan hated each other, berated each other and carried on a bitter feud.
Now one has the final word - the other one died.
"He was mad," Zebolan Simanto said yesterday in a cold upstairs room in a building housing two synagogues on a Kabul side-street that was once home to some 30 Jewish families.
"He was a magician and I am a businessman," Mr Simanto, a carpet dealer, said of his erstwhile foe Yitzhak Levy, a traditional healer, who occupied another room across the courtyard until he died last week, apparently of old age.
The pair were all that were left of a Jewish community that had been in Afghanistan for 800 years and used to blame each other for their woes.
Mr Levy used to accuse Mr Simanto of denouncing him to Afghanistan's Taliban government as an Israeli spy, which he said had landed him in jail five times. "They threw me on the floor and one sat on my neck and two on my feet. The other two beat me with electrical cables," he said.
Mr Simanto, in his 40s, levelled the same charge at Mr Levy. He said the Taliban had jailed him four times.
But the root of their mutual hatred lay in the seizure of the synagogue's Torah scrolls by the Taliban. "It was all his fault that they took the Torah," said Mr Simanto. Mr Levy, when he was alive, blamed Mr Simanto.
Handwritten on deerskin and wrapped in silk, 500 years old and worth $2 million, the scrolls were taken to the Interior Ministry by the Taliban.