Afghanistan’s Jewish Past

And in Afghanistan decades-old Jewish synagogues in the west of the country have now been renovated. They are now serving as much needed schools in the war-torn nation.

Behind a parade of old mud brick shops, a tiny door opens onto a courtyard, where school children play alongside the ghosts of Afghanistan’s Jewish past.

The Yu Aw is one of four synagogues in the old quarter of Herat city in western Afghanistan, which after decades of abandonment and neglect has been rebuilt and restored to provide desperately-needed space for a school.

When Israel was founded in 1948, around 280 Jewish families, descendants of a centuries-old community in Herat, began leaving and today no one remains.

Fatemeh Nezary, a teacher at the Suroosh school in the former synagogue, says most children are unaware of the place’s history.

[Fatemeh Nezary, Teacher, Suroosh Institute]:
„These children don’t know anything about this place. They are too young to understand right now and we tell our older students who are nearly the same age as I am, what this place was in the past, even though now it’s a school.“

The synagogue, made of a modest stone courtyard framed by of a series of small rooms, and the main prayer room, is over 100 years old.

Decades of rubbish had to be gutted from its cavity, revealing a natural a pool, thought to have been used for bathing rituals.

Jolyon Leslie is an architect who leads restoration projects in Herat’s old city with the Agha Khan Trust for Culture.

[Jolyon Leslie, Architect, Agha Khan Trust]:
„There are four surviving synagogues. Some of them are actually in ruins, one of them is in the process, one has already been reconstructed, two are in the process of being rebuilt, and one will be used as a school. The other one is already converted into a mosque and there is another which is already used as a mosque.“

A few kilometers away from the old quarter lies an open field where thorn bushes and weeds lie near white marble tombs inscribed in Hebrew.

The graves escaped decades of war and Taliban rule, although the families of those buried likely left the country.

(NTDTV)