For years, Zebulon Simentov branded himself as the "last Jew of Afghanistan," the sole remnant of a centuries-old community. He charged reporters for interviews and held court in Kabul's only remaining synagogue. He left the country last month for Istanbul after the Taliban seized power.

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Now it appears he was not the last one.

Simentov's distant cousin, Tova Moradi, was born and raised in Kabul and lived there until last week, more than a month after Simentov departed in September. Fearing for their safety, Moradi, her children, and nearly two dozen grandchildren fled the country in recent weeks in an escape orchestrated by an Israeli aid group, activists, and prominent Jewish philanthropists.

"I loved my country, loved it very much, but had to leave because my children were in danger," Moradi told The Associated Press from her modest quarters in the Albanian town of Golem, whose beachside resorts have been converted to makeshift homes for some 2,000 Afghan refugees.

Moradi, 83, was one of 10 children born to a Jewish family in Kabul. At age 16, she ran away from home and married a Muslim man. She never converted to Islam, maintained some Jewish traditions, and it was no secret in her neighborhood that she was Jewish.

"She never denied her Judaism, she just got married in order to save her life as you cannot be safe as a young girl in Afghanistan," Moradi's daughter, Khorshid, told The Associated Press from her home in Canada, where she and three of her siblings moved after the Taliban first seized power in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Despite friction over her decision to marry outside the faith, Moradi said she stayed in touch with some of her family over the years. Her parents and siblings fled Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1980s. Her parents are buried at Jerusalem's Har Menuhot cemetery, and many of her surviving siblings and their descendants live in Israel.

But until this week, she had not spoken to some of her sisters in over half a century.

"Yesterday, I saw my sisters, nieces, and nephews after around 60 years through a video call. We spoke for hours," Moradi said. "I was really happy, I saw their children and they met mine."

"They said 'it's like she came back from the grave,'" Khorshid said.

During the first period of Taliban rule, from 1996 until the 2001 US-led invasion, Moradi tried to maintain a low profile, but she risked her life by hiding Rabbi Isaak Levi, one of the few remaining Afghan Jews, from the Taliban.

Levi and Simentov lived together for years in the decrepit synagogue in Kabul but famously despised one another and fought often. The Taliban usually left them alone, but intervened during one such dispute, arresting them, beating them, and confiscating the synagogue's ancient Torah scroll, which went missing after the Taliban were driven from power.

"Isaak came to our home during the Taliban and we hid him for a month," Moradi said, as her grandson assisted her in retelling the story. They said when the Taliban came looking for him they said he was a Muslim. She made preparations to smuggle the rabbi out of the country, but his health degraded and he died in 2005. Simentov said he was happy to be rid of him.

Levi's remains were flown to Israel for burial, and Moradi has kept his old passport as a memento.

When the Taliban returned to power in August, weeks before the US completed its withdrawal after 20 years of war, Moradi and her family feared for their lives.

Khorshid said a relative had met an Orthodox Jewish businessman in Toronto, Joseph Friedberg, some years ago. After the fall of Kabul, he ran into Friedberg and sought help.

"He came to me and said 'they are going to kill my mother,'" Friedberg said. Friedberg said he reached out to IsraAid, an Israeli non-governmental humanitarian organization.

IsraAid CEO Yotam Polizer said the organization, which has provided relief after disasters such as the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, had already successfully extracted the Afghan women's cycling team and dozens of other Afghans from the country when it got word about Moradi and her family.

He said the two-month-long endeavor to get them out was assisted by Afghan diplomats overseas, Israeli President Isaac Herzog's office, and Jewish businessmen, including Israeli-Kazakh billionaire Alexander Mashkevich and Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams, who tapped contacts in Israel, Albania, Canada, and Tajikistan to help facilitate the family's escape.

Mashkevich said he "involved all my friends because it was very difficult."

The Israeli president's office declined to comment.

"We are so thankful that they are safe now," Khorshid said. "For the last two months since the Taliban takeover, I did not sleep at night."

Now, Moradi and six of her relatives are in Albania, and another 25 relatives made it to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates earlier this week. They hope to secure passage to Canada to reunite with her children who live there.

She also expressed hope she could visit Israel, see her siblings, and pray at the graves of her parents in Jerusalem. Her family in Israel could not be reached for comment.

"We still need for them to reach their final destination," Polizer said. "We're worried that they'll be stuck in limbo."

Adams, the Israeli-Canadian businessman, said he has appealed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office and Canada's immigration minister on behalf of Moradi in an effort to secure visas for the family, but efforts were hampered by September's Canadian election.

"We are in close contact and trying to put the appropriate amount of urgency in describing their plight," Adams said.

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The last member of Afghanistan's Jewish community left the country Tuesday. Zebulon Simentov – who lived in a dilapidated synagogue in Kabul, kept kosher and prayed in Hebrew – endured decades of war as the country's centuries-old Jewish community rapidly dwindled. But the Taliban takeover last month seems to have been the last straw.

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Moti Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman who runs a private security group that organized the evacuation, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the 62-year-old Simentov and 29 of his neighbors, nearly all of them women and children, have been taken to a "neighboring country."

Kahana said Simentov, who had lived under Taliban rule before, was not worried about them. But Kahana warned him that he was at risk of being kidnapped or killed by the far more radical Islamic State group. He said Simentov's neighbors also pressed him to leave, so that their children could join him on the bus out.

"For two weeks I pressured him to leave," Kahana told Israel Hayom. "I explained to him that there were two ways for the Taliban to make money by having a Jew, one of which is kidnapping him, and the second one beheading him and negotiating [for the body] in any case. In the end, he agreed."

Simentov asked to have 100 children from families in danger to be evacuated as well. Kan public broadcaster aired footage of the evacuation, showing a bus full of people traveling across what appeared to be Afghanistan, with all the faces blurred except for Simentov.

"Thus far, we have managed to get thirty children out, at Zebulon's request," Kahana said. "I am sure we will get to 100 children soon."

The evacuees  joined an exodus of tens of thousands of Afghans who have fled since the Taliban swept across the country last month. The US and its allies organized a massive airlift in the closing days of the 20-year-war, but officials acknowledged that up to 200 American citizens, as well as thousands of Afghans who had aided the war effort, were left behind.

Kahana said his group is reaching out to US and Israeli authorities to find a permanent home for Simentov, whose estranged wife and children live in Israel. For years, Simentov refused to grant his wife a divorce under Jewish law, which could open him up to legal repercussions in Israel. Kahana said he persuaded him to grant the divorce and has drawn up the paperwork.

"That was two weeks of being a shrink, a psychiatrist, talking to him like 10 times a day, and his neighbor at the same time to translate," Kahana said.

Hebrew manuscripts found in caves in northern Afghanistan indicate a thriving Jewish community existed there at least 1,000 years ago. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan was home to some 40,000 Jews, many of them Persian Jews who had fled forced conversion in neighboring Iran. The community's decline began with an exodus to Israel after its creation in 1948.

In an interview with AP in 2009, Simentov said the last Jewish families left after the 1979 Soviet invasion.

For several years he shared the synagogue building with the country's only other Jew, Isaak Levi, but they despised each other and feuded during the Taliban's previous rule from 1996 to 2001.

At one point, Levi accused Simentov of theft and spying and Simentov countered by accusing Levi of renting rooms to prostitutes, an allegation he denied, The New York Times reported in 2002. The Taliban arrested both men and beat them, and they confiscated the synagogue's ancient Torah scroll, which went missing after the Taliban were driven from power in the 2001 US-led invasion.

When his 80-year-old housemate died in 2005, Simentov said he was happy to be rid of him.

Reporters who visited Simentov over the years – and paid the exorbitant fees he charged for interviews – found a portly man fond of whiskey, who kept a pet partridge and watched Afghan TV. He observed Jewish dietary restrictions and ran a kebab shop.

Born in the western city of Herat in 1959, he always insisted Afghanistan was home.

Samir Khan, a neighbor who runs a small grocery store and had known Simentov for the last 10 years, said he disappeared about a week and a half ago. Khan said he only learned of Simentov's departure when he saw it on social media.

The Taliban, like other Islamic militant groups, are hostile to Israel but tolerated the country's minuscule Jewish community during their previous reign. Aside from the feud, the only other time they came knocking was when they noticed that Muslim women in all-encompassing burqas could often be seen visiting Levi.

When they briefly arrested Levi, he explained that he had a business selling amulets to women who wanted to become pregnant with sons or who were opposed to their husbands taking other wives, as allowed under Islamic law.

The Taliban released him.

Simentov's departure marks the end of more than a thousand years of Jewish presence in Afghanistan.

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