Kim Kardashian and rabbi rescue girls soccer team from Afghanistan
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Benyamin Cohen November 19, 2021
Kim Kardashian West and Rabbi Moshe Margaretten chartered a plane to help a soccer team of teenage girls flee Afghanistan for Britain. Leeds United, a U.K. soccer club, has offered to support the players, according to the Associated Press.
Rabbi Margaretten, who is based in New York, is the founder of the Tzedek Association, a non-profit group that focuses on criminal justice reform – a major cause for Kardashian West Indeed, on Thursday, Kardashian was one of several people who helped convince Oklahoma’s governor to commute the death sentence of Julius Jones, a convicted murderer who maintains his innocence.
“The Talmud states: If you save a life, you’ve saved a world,” Margaretten wrote on Twitter. “Kim Kardashian West saved a world today.”
The Tzedek Association has expanded its efforts in recent years to include obtaining medical equipment for frontline workers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and offering humanitarian assistance around the globe.
This is not Margaretten’s first time helping Afghans flee the war-torn country. He received international attention when, this fall, he helped rescue Zebulon Simantov, one of the last remaining Jews in Afghanistan. He also helped four young siblings from Afghanistan reunite with their mother in the United States.
“My parents, my grandparents, are Holocaust survivors,” Margaretten told CNN. “I don’t want any human being to go through the pain, to experience what our parents and grandparents went through, and we must help them. That’s why I jumped in and I did everything that I can – and am still trying to do.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
