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July 31, 2012
عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.
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July 13, 2012
عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.
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July 9, 2012
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June 15, 2012
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January 3, 2012
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Posted on عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.
October 24, 2011
عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.
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Posted on عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.
October 24, 2011
عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.
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Posted on Point of no return
06/10/2011
By Lyn Julius
This is a story of a Jew who owes her life to Englishmen. But it's also a story of how one of those Englishmen was helped by a Jew.
It is 44 years this week that the Six-Day Way broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbours. But the repercussions of Israel's lightning victory spread to every Arab country in which Jews still lived. A campaign of savage persecution ended the Jewish community in Egypt, Iraq and Libya.
Libya was wracked by disturbances for weeks after the start of the 1967 war. Arab mobs terrorised Jews, destroying property and claiming lives.
Gina Bublil Waldman was a 19-year-old Libyan Jew working for an engineering company on a site 30 km outside Tripoli. She spent a month sheltering from the rampaging mob in the garage of a British colleague. When the Libyan government finally allowed - or forced - the Jews to leave the country, Gina and her family were on a bus full of Jewish passengers bound for the airport.
Suddenly, the bus stopped. Alarmed at the suspicious behaviour of the driver, Gina rang one of the British company engineers for help. He drove over to rescue her just before the driver could douse the bus with petrol.
Another of Gina's English work colleagues, Brian Rodgers, modestly admits to playing a 'supporting role' in saving Gina. But he, in turn, is grateful to a Jew who helped him and his family during those terrible times.
On the Friday of the week of the Six-Day War, an enormous anti-Jewish demonstration took place in Tripoli. The crowds were going wild. The atmosphere was tense. Jews were advised to stay at home. However, all foreigners were viewed with suspicion: several Maltese were mistaken for Jews and murdered.
While US citizens were being evacuated, no special provision appeared to be made for British expatriates.
" And how are your Jewish friends today?" inquired Mansour the driver. Brian did indeed have Jewish friends. One, Ever, had been a close friend for three years before the war broke out. He warned Brian that he and his family were in danger if they did not get out of the country: the demonstrators were hotheads from the town of Zawiya, who, in 1948, had burnt down the synagogue of that town.
Together with a Berber Muslim, Ever resolved to drive in the early morning the 10 km to Brian's house to hand him the money for the airfares for him and his family. In so doing, Ever could have been shot for breaking curfew.
As it happened, Brian chose not follow Ever's advice (to leave then would have meant instant dismissal from his company). His loyal wife Shirley refused to leave without him. But they remain grateful to Ever for his outstanding act of bravery.
Dodi, a furniture importer, was another of Brian's Jewish friends. His father shipped hospital beds from Libya to Israel in 1948. Dodi helped arrange for Brian's Palestinian Christian neighbour to visit her family in Nablus on a Lebanese passport.
But the easy-going relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews ended after 1967, and soon after, Colonel Gaddafi seized power in a coup. Their property destroyed or seized, the remaining Libyan Jews fled. Ever ended up in Israel. Dodi left for Italy, but was imprisoned for a short time on a return visit to Libya in 1969. (Brian believes he was not ill-treated.)
Gina managed to re-establish contact with her British saviours after many years. Dodi is dead, but Brian, now retired to the peaceful English county of Shropshire, still keeps in touch with Ever. Brian will never forget how Ever risked his life to save him and his family. Of such deeds true friendship is made.
View article hereJune 14, 2011
This is a story of a Jew who owes her life to Englishmen. But it’s also a story of how one of those Englishmen was helped by a Jew.
It is 44 years this week that the Six-Day Way broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbours. But the repercussions of Israel’s lightning victory spread to every Arab country in which Jews still lived. A campaign of savage persecution ended the Jewish community in Egypt, Iraq and Libya.
قراءة المزيد
Posted on The Jewish Chronicle Online
March 10th, 2011
By: Simon Rocker
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Aldo Habib: lost property"]
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His mother and three sisters escaped to Milan, while he and his British wife, Eveleen, came to London, where he had bought a home three years earlier. "That was my lucky deal," he said.
His father had been the president of the Jewish community and was "quite influential in the country".
As well as owning a successful import and export business, his father was also a judge in Tripoli. The family owned a 100-hectare farm and helped local farmers to export their produce.
When Colonel Gaddafi, attempting rapprochement with the West, indicated a few years ago that Libya would be open to compensation claims, Mr Habib, now 82, wrote in 2009 to the relevant office in Tripoli. But there has been no response.
"The assets of my family are probably in the region of £7 million," he said.
Despite the riots of 1967, he entertains positive memories. "The people are nice, they are not anti-Jewish," he said. "I have Arab friends there.
"A school friend of mine I hadn't seen in years came to look me up when he came here a couple of years ago. I try to phone him now, but I can't get through."
Seven years ago, Mr Habib told a conference on restitution for Jews from Arab lands that the time was right "for those who have been deprived of their liberty and their property to be justly compensated". At the same time, he expressed hopes of peace and prosperity for "the Libyan people for whom I have a great regard".
When his father died in 1962, more than 500 people from all nationalities came to the funeral. But life changed after 1967.
"My father's grave does not exist," he said. "They built two skyscrapers on top of the Jewish cemetery."
View article hereJune 14, 2011
Aldo Habib has not seen the country of his birth since 1967, when his family left Libya in the aftermath of the Six-Day War.
But now he thinks that the British government should consider using some of the £1 billion of frozen assets belonging to the Gaddafi family in this country to compensate Libyan Jews for what they lost.
Mr Habib’s own family left behind properties worth millions when they were forced to flee as mobs roamed the streets, killing Jews and looting businesses.
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Posted on Jerusalem Post
June 6th, 2011
By: Lisa Palmiere-Billig
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="311" caption="Dr. David Gerbi (center) in Benghazi, Libya."]
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ROME – Dr. David Gerbi, a Libyan Jewish Jungian psychoanalyst who found refuge in Italy after the pogroms of 1967, has cast his lot with the Libyan rebels in Bengazi and their interim government, the National Transitional Council.
The first Libyan Jew to join the rebels, he has returned to Rome after a week of volunteer work at the Bengazi Psychiatric Hospital, teaching his colleagues there the techniques of healing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Gerbi dedicates his life to retrieving his several identities while working for democracy and reconciliation. In 2004, he was appointed by the UN High Commission for Refugees to serve as a Witness for Peace mentor, and in 2007 he was named the commission’s Ambassador for Peace in South Africa.
One of his principle aims is salvaging the Libyan Jewish-Arab cultural heritage (dating as far back as the third century BCE) from which he and all Libyan Jews now dispersed across the world were so abruptly severed following repeated Arab riots and massacres related to political incitement against the State of Israel, notably in 1945, 1948 and 1967.
“I was warmly welcomed in Bengazi by the leaders of the rebel government as a returned exile, as a Jew, an Italian, a psychoanalyst, and as a Libyan citizen with full rights to travel and live in Libya,” Gerbi told The Jerusalem Post last week.
Gerbi feels the time is ripe for exiled Libyan Jews to openly support the National Transitional Council and its struggle for democracy and human rights. During his visit last month to the Rabbi Cyril Harris Jewish Community Centre in Johannesburg, its president, Hazel Cohen, commended Gerbi for his “courage to break the psycho-genetic culture of silence that has beset the exiled Jews of Libya and to speak out about the oppression and crimes against humanity committed by the Gaddafi regime.”
Gerbi hopes that with the advent of a democratic and pluralistic Libya, exiled Jews will be permitted to regain their passports and return for travel, work or residence.
He plans to propose a proper religious burial of the remains of Libyan Jews in the Bengazi cemetery (whose bones are presently stored in trunks), the re-consecration of the Homs and Derna Jewish Cemeteries, the reconstruction of the synagogues of Tripoli and Jefren (Yafran), and renewed negotiations regarding collective and individual property confiscated from the Jewish community by the Gaddafi regime.
In pursuing these dreams for his people, Gerbi has repeatedly risked his safety in the past 10 years by going on solo missions to Libya (in 2002, 2007 and 2009). He even tried to persuade Muammar Gaddafi in person, under the tent set up for him during his visit to Rome last year, to support these efforts – but to no avail.
During Gerbi’s sojourn in Tripoli in 2007, Libyan police arrested him and confiscated six mezuzot he had brought with him, and the money he had hoped to use to begin the restoration of the Sla Dar Bisni Synagogue. They kept the mezuzot but later returned the money.
Now in Israel to attend the wedding of a nephew, Gerbi plans an immediate return to the Bengazi Psychiatric Hospital to continue his volunteer work.
He hopes to eventually become an official voice for the revival of Jewish life in Libya.
View article hereJune 14, 2011
ROME – Dr. David Gerbi, a Libyan Jewish Jungian psychoanalyst who found refuge in Italy after the pogroms of 1967, has cast his lot with the Libyan rebels in Bengazi and their interim government, the National Transitional Council.
The first Libyan Jew to join the rebels, he has returned to Rome after a week of volunteer work at the Bengazi Psychiatric Hospital, teaching his colleagues there the techniques of healing post-traumatic stress disorder.
قراءة المزيد
