Kim Kardashian and rabbi rescue girls soccer team from Afghanistan

Kim Kardashian West and Rabbi Moshe Margaretten.

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.”

Benyamin Cohen is news director at the Forward. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect, and has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He lives with his wife in West Virginia with their three dogs, a cat and a flock of chickens known as the Co-Hens.

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