For years, Zebulon Simentov branded himself as the “last Jew of Afghanistan.” 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.

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. 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 the age of 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 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,” her daughter, Khorshid, told the AP 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 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.

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

He said Afghan diplomats overseas, Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s office, and Jewish businessmen. worked together to get them out.

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.

Three women who worked for a local radio and TV station in eastern Afghanistan have been shot dead in separate attacks, the news editor of the station said.

Shokrullah Pasoon, of Enikass Radio and TV in Jalalabad, said one of the women, Mursal Wahidi, was walking home when gunmen opened fire, according to witnesses.

The other two, identified only as Shahnaz and Sadia, were shot in a separate incident, also walking home from work. Two other people, apparently passers-by, were wounded in the attack.

Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for media workers, with 15 killed in the last six months.

The three women dubbed popular and often emotion-laden dramas from Turkey and India into Afghanistan’s local languages of Dari and Pashtu, said Pasoon.

No one claimed the latest killings, but in December an affiliate of the so-called Islamic State group, headquartered in eastern Afghanistan, claimed the killing of another female Enikass employee, Malala Maiwand.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied any involvement in the killings. In a statement, President Ashraf Ghani condemned the murders, saying “attacks on innocent compatriots, especially women, are contrary to the teachings of Islam, Afghan culture and the spirit of peace”.

The killings are part of a larger spike in targeted killings in Afghanistan in the past year coinciding with the signing of a peace deal between the US and the Taliban in February 2020.

The Taliban have denied involvement in most of the targeted killings. The Taliban and the government blame each other for staging the attacks to discredit the peace deal or win greater concessions.

The Biden administration is reviewing the deal which calls for the withdrawal of US and Nato troops by May 1. Officials say no decision has been made.

Enikass Radio and TV is a privately owned outlet that broadcasts “news, various political, social, Islamic, educational, satirical and engaging programmes and standard dubbing of serials and movies for the people of Afghanistan”, according to its website.

The Afghan Journalists Safety Committee issued a statement condemning the killings and criticising government investigations of previous killings of journalists, saying they were “not satisfactory at all, something that needs to be changed”.

The Vienna-headquartered International Press Institute called the killings an “unspeakable act”.

In a statement, deputy director Scott Griffen called on the Afghan government to find and apprehend the culprits, adding: “The only way to stop the spread of violence against journalists is to break the cycle of impunity, ensuring that no one who attacks or kills a journalist or media worker can get away with it.”