When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, Simentov went to Israel with his family, where his wife, daughters and sisters now live, but returned to Kabul after just two months.
"I did not want to stay there. Afghanistan is my homeland," he told Foreign Policy.
When he returned, Simentov encountered Yitzhak Levi, nearly two decades his senior, living at the Kabul synagogue. The two did not hit it off: They "fought viciously about which of them was the rightful owner of the land," according to a 2017 Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile of Simentov. They moved into different wings of the synagogue.
In 1998, Levi wrote to the Taliban interior minister to accuse Simentov of theft of Jewish relics. Simentov retorted by telling the Taliban that Levi ran a secret brothel where he sold alcohol, which Levi denies. Simentov also spread rumors that Levi had converted to Islam, which Levi denied as well.
"I don't talk to him, he's the devil," Simentov told The New York Times in 2002. "A dog is better than him … I don't have many complaints about the Taliban, but I have a lot of complaints about him." Levi replied that Simentov was "a thief and a liar.'"
The Taliban was so annoyed by their constant fighting that they threw them in jail. But they eventually kicked them out when they continued to fight inside the prison. Levi died in 2005.
"[The Taliban] beat me a lot," Simentov told Foreign Policy. "I was imprisoned several times because of this charlatan Levy [sic]. He wanted to get rid of me to sell the synagogue. But thank God he was not successful."