Posted on Jerusalem Post
July 31, 2012
Gil Shefler
Raphael Luzon, a former Libyan Jew, returned to the UK safely on Sunday after security forces in Benghazi imprisoned and interrogated him for several days.
Luzon said his ordeal began in Benghazi on July 22 when “suddenly a friend sent me a text warning me to be careful that security forces are looking for me,” he recalled. “I immediately called the Italian consul who came to my hotel, but when I went to the lobby to meet him he was surrounded by 12 to 15 armed men.
They didn’t let the consul speak, they put me in the car and took me outside Benghazi.”
Luzon, who said he was in the country for business, was kept behind bars at a military camp outside the Mediterranean city without being told why.
“I felt my life was in danger for the first 24 hours because no one knew where I was or what had happened to me,” Luzon said. “In the morning high officials came. One of them, a general shouted at my captors saying they should have brought me food and water.”
The Libyan Jew said men he identified as belonging to the muchabarat, or the preventive security, interrogated him daily.
Meanwhile, news that a “Jewish leader was abducted” appeared in the Libyan press.
After four days in prison, Luzon was freed and kept under house arrest at a friend’s residence in Benghazi.
Still, he was not allowed to leave the country. A citizen of Britain and Italy, Luzon said both countries intervened on his behalf. He credited British MP Robert Halfon, whose father was a Libyan Jew, and Italian consul Guido Bessanti, for securing his release.
Asked why he had been arrested, Luzon said he was still not sure.
“I don’t know why, but privately I’ve been told that there is a big fight between the groups and everybody wanted to be the one that arrested and released me,” he said.
Luzon and other members of the former Jewish community of Libya, who were forced to leave the country in the 1960s and 1970s, have for years been lobbying for the return of considerable private and communal Jewish assets that were confiscated by the regime of slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi. After Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, there was hope the country might open up and address the grievances of its exiled Jews, but so far little progress has been made.
Last year David Gerbi, another Libyan-born Jew, received death threats after he tried to reconsecrate a synagogue in Tripoli, forcing him to flee the country.
Luzon, who makes a point of distancing himself from Gerbi, has been negotiating with Libyan officials over the rights of Jews to little avail.
Elio Raccah, a member of the Jewish Libyan community in exile based in Italy, the country’s former colonial ruler, said he had few expectations that he would be welcome back to Libya in the near future.
“What really counts is popular sentiment, I am convinced nothing has really changed over there as far as the Jews are concerned,” he wrote in an email to the Post. “[The Libyans believe Jews are] undesired greedy ogres to be ridden of in Palestine and, of course, in Libya.”
The question of Jewish rights remains mute in Libya, where a multitude of rival groups and clans are fighting for power in the power vacuum created by Gaddafi’s ousting. Last month, when elections were held for the first time, the National Forces Alliance, a non-Islamist, liberal party, emerged triumphant, bucking the Islamist trend in Arab Spring countries like Tunisia and Egypt. It remains to be seen, however, whether Western-educated Mahmoud Jibril who leads the party will be able to reestablish the rule of law in the oil-rich nation.
Despite his recent experience, Luzon said he had not given up fighting for the rights of Libyan Jews.
“It will take a long, long time if they will allow some Jewish assets to be returned,” he said, “but I think the country would allow Jews to return for holiday or business in a few years.”
“They were under a regime for decades and they do not distinguish between a Jew and a Jewish Zionist, religious or secular,” Luzon added.
Meanwhile, he added, “at the moment I do not advise any Jew to go to Libya.”
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July 31, 2012
Jerusalem Post July 31, 2012 Gil Shefler Raphael Luzon, a former Libyan Jew, returned to the UK safely on Sunday after security forces in Benghazi imprisoned and interrogated him for several days. Luzon said his ordeal began in Benghazi on July 22 when “suddenly a friend sent me a text warning me to be careful […]
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Posted on The Jewish Chronicle Online
July 13, 2012
Lyn Julius
Last month, the UN marked World Refugee Day, a star-studded awareness campaign in which millions took part. Yet mention of one group of refugees was absent: the 870,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries since 1948. "Their history," said Israel's UN envoy Ron Prosor, "remains one of the 20th century's greatest untold stories".
Almost exactly 45 years ago, Gina Bublil joined their ranks. She narrowly escaped rioting mobs and death at the hands of a driver who, instead of taking her family to the airport, tried to burn them alive inside a bus during the brutal 1967 expulsion of Libya's remaining Jews. Her family's warehouse was burnt down and their assets confiscated. All because she was a Jew.
In March, the pursuit of justice for Jewish refugees like Gina became official Israeli government policy, thanks to a campaign by the deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, himself the son of an Algerian-Jewish refugee.
Around half of Israel's Jews descend from refugees from Arab and Muslim lands. Another 200,000 found sanctuary in the West. Few have received compensation. Arab governments have never admitted committing mass violations of Jewish human and civil rights, much less apologised or offered restitution. Yet, while more than 120 UN resolutions deal with the 711,000 Palestinian refugees, not one refers to the greater number of Jewish refugees. Until the Ayalon initiative, the Israeli government was mealy-mouthed in raising the issue, for fear that the Arabs would raise the Palestinian refugee issue. Israel's neglect has led to a major distortion in the way the conflict is understood.
Matters began to change in 2010: the Knesset quietly passed a law stipulating that Israel would not sign a peace deal without securing compensation for Jewish refugees. Israeli embassies around the world have been instructed to promote Jewish refugee rights. Ayalon has proposed a national memorial day for them. Last week, a draft bill making compulsory the perpetuation of the memory of these pre-Islamic Jewish communities was submitted for approval.
Ayalon's initiative breaks new ground, by placing blame for the creation of two sets of refugees - Jewish and Palestinian - at the door of the Arab League. In 1947, Arab League states drafted a plan to persecute their Jewish citizens; their rejection of the UN Partition plan and declaration of war on Israel resulted in the Palestinian exodus. Ayalon's ministry recommends that a global compensation fund be established to compensate both sets of refugees.
Why raise the issue when no Jew sees himself as a refugee today? They are full citizens of Israel and the West. The politics of Israeli Jews from Arab lands tend to be hawkish, coloured by the open wound of their trauma. Justice for Jews is a matter of human rights. Appreciation of mutual suffering can help achieve reconciliation.
Equally, the successful absorption of Jewish refugees provides a template for the resettlement of Arab refugees in Palestine and Arab states. Except in Jordan, Palestinians are denied the right to citizenship, and in many cases, jobs and property. The Jewish refugee issue also contextualises the Palestinian "right of return".
Borders can be agreed, Jerusalem can be divided, but the Palestinians will never abandon their goal of turning Israel into an Arab-majority state by flooding it with millions of refugees. Return of the Jewish refugees to unsafe and inhospitable lands, on the other hand, is unthinkable.
In May, US senator Mark Kirk won an amendment to a bill requiring the agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, UNWRA, to distinguish between genuine refugees and their five million descendants. Stripped back of bogus claimants, it becomes clear that an irreversible exchange of roughly equal refugee populations took place.
The Jewish refugee issue is evidence that Jews are not colonial interlopers, but an indigenous people deserving of self-determination. Moreover, they are crucial to understanding the Arab and Muslim world's religious and cultural resistance to the idea of a Jewish state. For 14 centuries Jews lived under Muslim rule as dhimmis - inferior subjects with few rights and little security.
Lastly, the persecution of other non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities - bound to intensify with Islamist election wins - shows that Israel is not the cause of the displacement of the region's Jews, but a necessary haven of stability and security in a sea of dysfunction, cruelty and chaos.
Read More July 13, 2012
The Jewish Chronicle Online July 13, 2012 Lyn Julius Last month, the UN marked World Refugee Day, a star-studded awareness campaign in which millions took part. Yet mention of one group of refugees was absent: the 870,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries since 1948. “Their history,” said Israel’s UN envoy Ron Prosor, “remains one of […]
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Posted on The Jerusalem Post
July 9, 2012
David Harris
Libya is once again in the news.
It’s been a while, since the media largely lost interest following Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ouster and assassination.
The North African nation just held its first election. What emerges will doubtless have regional consequences.
But there’s another reason Libya should be in the public eye now, though don’t hold your breath it will make the news anytime soon.
Forty-five years ago this month, the last Jews of Libya were forced to flee the country. They included my wife, then 16 years old, her seven siblings, and her parents.
In the end, they were among the lucky ones.
Some would call them, and the few thousand other Jews who remained in the country after 1951, naïve. That’s when Libya gained its independence from the British. There had already been pogroms in 1945 and 1948. The vast majority of Jews had no confidence that a newly sovereign Libya, whatever its constitutional guarantees might promise, would emerge democratic and law-abiding, and they left.
The remaining Libyan Jews were targeted following the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War, a thousand miles away, for no other reason than that they were Jews.
My wife’s family found a raging mob in front of their Tripoli home, and calls rang out to burn the house down. The ten occupants trembled in fear inside.
Miraculously, they were saved. One man courageously addressed the mob and told them to leave the family alone. He knew them, he said, and they were good people.
The crowd dispersed to look for other Jews, while this lone individual arranged for the family to be shuttled to a safe house for a couple of weeks until they could manage to go abroad.
They left on July 14, never to return.
The link with the country today known as Libya – believed to date back to the tragic 15th century exodus of Jews from Spain, in the case of my wife’s maternal lineage, and 2,000 years to the involuntary Roman transport of Jews from Palestine in the case of her paternal lineage – was severed.
Italy, which had once been the colonial power in Libya, gave the family refuge.
With nothing other than a few suitcases and barely a couple hundred dollars, they started new lives.
But rather than wallow in victimization, they put one foot in front of the other and moved forward. It wasn’t easy, especially for such a large family, but they did what they had to do.
Meanwhile, dozens of other Libyan Jews weren’t as fortunate.
With no one to stand up for them, and the government of Libyan King Idris quite impotent, they were hunted down and killed.
What happened to the brave soul who saved my wife’s family?
He survived, but begged the family never to disclose his name. He feared retribution from fellow Libyans who might do him harm for the “crime” of saving ten Jews.
And what of the Jewish legacy in Libya?
Here was a community that had lived on the soil for more than two millennia, long predating the occupation by invading armies from the Arabian Peninsula. And Jews, numbering nearly 50,000 at their peak, had contributed in every way imaginable to the area’s development.
Libya went to work to erase every trace of Jewish existence.
What lessons can we take from this neglected anniversary?
First, if a new regime in Tripoli wants to distinguish itself from its predecessors, one way would be to acknowledge that Jews once lived in the country, that they were forcibly expelled and their synagogues and cemeteries destroyed, and that a process of honest reckoning with these crimes is warranted.
Second, the international community should at long last acknowledge these Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the injustices they endured.
When people meet my wife and hear her story, many ask why they didn’t know what befell the Jews of Libya.
The answer begins with the fact that no UN body, neither at the time nor since, has ever taken action in response to what happened.
Nor did the international media focus on what took place. To the contrary, the tragic events hardly merited any space in the world’s leading print and broadcast outlets.
And last, but by no means least, there’s the inevitable contrast with the Palestinians.
Libyan Jews, like the hundreds of thousands of other Jews from Arab countries uprooted and sent packing simply because they were Jews, found new homes primarily in Israel, but also in Western Europe and North and South America.
Were many bitter about their forced exodus? No doubt. But they impressively started over and quickly began playing a part in their new countries.
In the case of the Palestinians—some of whom were encouraged to leave their homes by Arab leaders who promised a quick return, and some of whom became refugees in a war their Arab brethren began against Israel—the story has been entirely different. They always seem to be in the news.
They have a special agency, UNRWA, devoted entirely to them, with no mandate for resettlement in other countries and an unprecedented, open-ended definition of "refugee," which is transferred from one generation to the next. With support from colleagues on both sides of the aisle, U.S. Senator Mark Kirk, to his great credit, has begun to shine the spotlight on this ongoing travesty.
Moreover, Arab countries, with the exception of Jordan, cry crocodile tears for the Palestinians, but largely refuse to give them citizenship and, in places like Lebanon, even restrict their participation in the economy.
So while the world watches post-election Libya to see what unfolds, I’ll be watching, too.
And I shall also be waiting to see if, after 45 years, Libya is ready to confront its past.
Yes, this is about Jews, but not only.
For the Arab upheaval to have a chance to turn into an Arab spring, newly emerging regimes need to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the protection of minorities – and, yes, to confront the consequences of that lack of protection in the past.
It’s high time, I’d say.
Read More...July 9, 2012
The Jerusalem Post July 9, 2012 David Harris Libya is once again in the news. It’s been a while, since the media largely lost interest following Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ouster and assassination. The North African nation just held its first election. What emerges will doubtless have regional consequences. But there’s another reason Libya should be in […]
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Posted on The Jerusalem Post
June 15, 2012
By Gil Shefler
Talks over the restoration of Jewish property confiscated by slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi will commence next year, a Jewish leader said on Wednesday, quoting a high-ranking Libyan government official.
Raphael Luzon, a Libyan-born Jew whose family was forced into exile in 1967, said the general director of the Libyan Prime Minister’s Office promised talks would start after a constitution is drafted in 2013.
“They will start giving back lands taken by Gaddafi from Muslims and then there will be a second wave for Jews,” said Luzon, who just returned from the country where he met with political figures. “Whoever will present official documents will get back the money, but we need another year and only after the second election they will appoint such a man.”
Luzon would not disclose the name of the official he met, but said it was public knowledge in Libya.
Most Libyan Jews left for Israel during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those who remained were forced out by Gaddafi in the late 1960s leaving their personal assets behind. The flamboyant dictator’s regime also confiscated Jewish communal property, in one case paving a highway over the ancient Jewish cemetery in Tripoli.
Luzon, who lives in the UK and is part of a group of Jews born in Libya with property claims in the country, said the assets involved were considerable.
“I saw files like my father’s who left $10 million, but there are others that left even $100m.,” he said.
Meanwhile, Libya continues to suffer from chronic political instability. General elections now set to take place next month have been postponed several times as violence between tribes has flared. In light of the circumstances the question of Jewish rights remains on the backburner.
David Gerbi, another Jew born in Libya, hastily cut short a visit to Tripoli last year, fearing for his life after he tried to reconsecrate an abandoned synagogue.
He had been in the country several months supporting the opposition to Gaddafi.
The expat Jewish Libyan community has enlisted the help of the US Congress to apply pressure on Tripoli to address its concerns.
Read More...June 15, 2012
The Jerusalem Post June 15, 2012 By Gil Shefler Talks over the restoration of Jewish property confiscated by slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi will commence next year, a Jewish leader said on Wednesday, quoting a high-ranking Libyan government official. Raphael Luzon, a Libyan-born Jew whose family was forced into exile in 1967, said the general director […]
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Posted on Jewish Chronicle
Interview: David Gerbi
Fighting on, the man who wants the Jews back in Libya
By Jeremy Josephs, December 29, 2011
It's official - Dr David Gerbi still has his sense of humour. And given what happened to the 56-year-old psychiatrist earlier this year, that is quite surprising.
Two days after Yom Kippur, Gerbi had to leave Libya in a hurry after hundreds of protesters called for his deportation. He even received death threats. His crime? Defiling an "archaeological site". In fact, he was trying to pray in Tripoli's sealed-up Dar al-Bishi Synagogue, where no Jew had worsphipped for decades.
The Libyan-born Gerbi had returned to the country from Italy, where, as a 12-year-old, he went into exile with his family when the last remnants of the community were expelled in 1967. On arriving back in the land of his birth, he had joined up with the revolutionary forces and provided them with specialist psychiatric care. With the fall of Gaddafi he seized the moment to reassert the Jewish presence in Libya.
The angry reaction of some of his erstwhile comrades-in-arms might have shaken his resolve, but far from it. In fact, he can still see the funny side.
"Hey, I've got a joke for you," he announces, before the interview has even got under way.
"Three Jews are going to be executed and are lined up in front of a firing squad. The sergeant in charge asks each Jew whether or not he wants a blindfold. 'Yes,' says the first Jew, in a resigned tone. 'OK,' says the second Jew, bracing himself to his grim fate. 'And what about you?' he enquires of the third Jew. 'No,' says the third Jew, 'no, I don't want your lousy blindfold. You can stick your blindfold.' At this, the second Jew leans over to the third one and says: "Listen, Moshe, take a blindfold. Don't make trouble'."
Gerbi has told this joke not just to make me laugh but because, as he says, "it happens to be pertinent to what I have been going through. The attitudes expressed by many members of my own family echoed the sentiments of this joke. For far too long there has been a culture of silence and suppression within the exiled Libyan Jewish community. We have been invisible and mute. My own family was against me. 'Keep a low profile. Don't make a fuss. Get over it - accept what has happened and move on.' That was the approach. Just like in the joke. But I can't and I won't.
"We have suffered a historic wrong - and one which I have every intention of putting right. The Palestinians are masters of ensuring that their rights are recognised. Everyone, it seems, now dances to their tune. Standing ovations all round at the United Nations. But tell me, why am I not entitled to speak up for the rights of Libyan Jewry? I was exiled at 12 years of age in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. But for some strange reason, when it comes to Jews from Arab lands, people sit around and shrug their shoulders rather than say out loud that there has been a historic injustice which needs to be put right."
The history of Jews in Libya stretches back to the third century BC. They settled mostly in coastal towns such as Tripoli and Benghazi and lived under a shifting string of rulers, including Romans, Ottoman Turks, and Italians. The majority of the 38,000-strong community fled to Israel in the years following the devastating pogrom of 1945. The remaining 6,000 finally left in 1967, many of them, like Gerbi's family, settling in Rome. Their assets and possessions were confiscated by Gaddafi after he came to power in 1969.
Now, with Gaddafi gone, Gerbi is a man on a mission. And whereas less courageous individuals might have been dissuaded from walking around Tripoli wearing a kippot or by protesters bearing placards announcing that "there is no place for Jews in Libya", he ignores them and ploughs on undeterred.
Why? Because he wants the Dar al-Bishi synagogue to become the symbol of reconciliation between Jewish and Muslim Libyans, despite the discouraging and dangerous nature of his first tentative steps.
Within the walls of Tripoli's Old City the faded, peach-coloured synagogue of Gerbi's childhood is in a sorry state. The Star of David is still visible inside and an empty ark where Torah scrolls were once kept still reads Shemah Israel in faded Hebrew. But all around there is graffiti painted on the walls, empty paint cans are strewn across the floor, next to an unsightly array of plastic water-bottles, clothes, mattresses and the carcasses of dead pigeons. The site of the mikvah, once used for ritual cleansing, is now a rubbish dump where stray cats scour for food. When Gerbi entered the synagogue, having knocked down a concrete wall with a sledgehammer to get in, he said a prayer and cried.
"What Gaddafi tried to do is to eliminate our memory. To eliminate our amazing language. To remove all trace of the Jewish people," he declares. "I want to bring our legacy back. I want to give a chance for the Jews of Libya to return."
Despite the odds being stacked up against him, and a total absence of funding to give momentum to his campaign (Gerbi has been nominated as the executive director of the World Organization of Libyan Jews but pays for everything out of funds generated from his private practice in Rome), it remains his intention to become a member of Libya's new National Transitional Council, either as a parliamentarian in his own right or as the country's official representative for Libyan Jewry. But everything remains in the pending tray.
"I am still waiting for an answer," he complains. "But in my view Mustafa' Jalil, who heads the NTC, is playing a rather duplicitous game by saying that people like me who have other nationalities can't participate in the new Libya. Of course, that is the most ridiculous reasoning I have ever heard. I only have an Italian passport because I was kicked out of Libya in the first place. Sometimes when you hear such distorted thinking, you don't know whether to laugh or cry."
But Gerbi will continue pressing his case. He plans to propose a proper religious burial of the remains of Libyan Jews in the Benghazi cemetery (whose bones are currently stored in trunks), the re-consecration of the Homs and Derna Jewish cemeteries, the reconstruction of the synagogues of Tripoli and Jefren, and renewed negotiations regarding collective and individual property confiscated by the Gaddafi regime - including his late parents' shop and home in Tripoli.
He insists, however, that he has no intention of becoming a martyr to the cause, and after his last experience in Libya, intends to proceed with great caution in terms of his personal safety. He readily admits that he has made mistakes and caused distress both to his family and the exiled Libyan Jewish community.
Which surely leads one to conclude, therefore, that if he could attribute words to his beloved parents and grandparents, they too would have counselled him to leave Libya well alone.
"No, no," he responds. "Despite all I have said, I don't believe that to be the case. Because I feel that they would appreciate that I am at least trying to do something. I like to think that they would acknowledge that I have not remained as a fearful child, permanently embracing the role of the victim, but that I have grown and become a man.
"Whatever the case, I can tell you one thing - that the days of being invisible and mute are over."
Read more hereJanuary 3, 2012
Jewish Chronicle Interview: David Gerbi Fighting on, the man who wants the Jews back in Libya By Jeremy Josephs, December 29, 2011 It’s official – Dr David Gerbi still has his sense of humour. And given what happened to the 56-year-old psychiatrist earlier this year, that is quite surprising. Two days after Yom Kippur, Gerbi […]
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Posted on Jerusalem Post
10/20/2011
By Gil Shefer
“He wanted to eliminate the memory of 2,000 years of Jewish history in Libya," David Gerbi says of Muammar Gaddafi.
David Gerbi recalled on Thursday his first and last face-to-face encounter with Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator killed earlier in the day by rebel forces in his hometown of Sirte.
In 2009, Gerbi, a Libyan-born Jew, accepted an invitation to meet Gaddafi in Rome to speak about improving relations between the regime and Libya’s Jewish Diaspora.
“I can see his face in front of me now,” Gerbi related in an interview conducted via Skype from Rome. “He had the eyes of a Beduin, someone who could find water in the desert, but he could not connect with our reality.”
Gerbi was one of the few members of the Jewish Libyan community in Rome who came to the meeting. The rest had boycotted the gathering because it was provocatively held on a Saturday, the Jewish day of rest. During the meeting, Gerbi said he pressed the autocrat to restore the rights of Jews and permit the reopening of the country’s synagogues, which lay in waste.
“He said, ‘Yes, yes, there would be no problem,’” Gerbi recalled, “but nothing happened.”
The killing of the Libyan leader on Thursday marked the final chapter in the troubled history between Gaddafi and Libyan Jewry.
When the young colonel came to power in 1969 the Jewish community of Libya, which traced its history back to antiquity, had already been decimated by pogroms carried out by Muslims angered over the Israeli-Arab conflict. From a peak of around 30,000 during the 1930s, only a few hundred remained, but it was Gaddafi’s policies that brought about the community’s elimination. He confiscated private and communal Jewish property, withheld civil rights for Jews and forbade those who had taken refuge abroad from returning.
“The damage he did in 1969 was that he did not allow Jewish people to come back; he did not allow them to renew the passports,” said Gerbi.
“He destroyed the Jewish cemeteries in Tripoli and Benghazi. He converted synagogues into mosques. He wanted to eliminate our memory of 2,000 years of Jewish people in Libya.”
The few Jews who were still in Libya fled. By 2002, none remained.
In recent years Gaddafi held irregular talks with Libyan Jews in the Diaspora, preferring to deal with those in Italy over their brethren in Israel, the “Zionist entity” he would often vilify in his lengthy tirades. The self-styled “Brother Leader” and “King of Kings” would sometimes promise to consider returning their rights and property, and allowed a few individuals to visit, but nothing ever came to fruition.
By the time the revolution against his regime came late last year there was talk of progress, but it was too little, too late.
Raphael Luzon, a leader of the Libyan Jewish community in the UK, preferred to look forward on Thursday, saying it was an excellent opportunity to open a new page in relations between Jews and the new Libyan government.
“Of course, we are happy and giving our solidarity to the Libyan people for this day that hopefully will end the war and start a reconstruction of a new and democratic Libya open to all,” he wrote in an e-mail.
“We understand that now the Libyan leaders have to form a new government that creates a commission to write down a new constitution and fix a date for general elections.”
Gerbi said he preferred to be cautious.
He recently spent several months in Libya, where he went to show support for the rebels. However, he was forced to leave after a muchpublicized attempt to restore a synagogue in Tripoli causing a furor among locals. He said that post- Gaddafi Libya must reverse the slain dictator’s policies toward non-Muslims.
“This day [has] arrived and now is the time to reorganize, but they have to decide which way to go: either to become a democracy with a Jewish minority or go with the Islamists,” he said. “It’s an important day and we’re going to see what will come next.”
Both Luzon and Gerbi hope to be invited by the National Transitional Council governing the country to take part in the democratic process.
Gerbi, a Jungian psychologist by profession, offered a psychological interpretation of the challenges that now face Libya after the killing of its autocratic leader.
“It’s easy to get rid of Gaddafi the person,” he said, “but much more difficult to get rid of the Gaddafi within.”
Read article hereOctober 24, 2011
Jerusalem Post 10/20/2011 By Gil Shefer “He wanted to eliminate the memory of 2,000 years of Jewish history in Libya,” David Gerbi says of Muammar Gaddafi. David Gerbi recalled on Thursday his first and last face-to-face encounter with Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator killed earlier in the day by rebel forces in his hometown of […]
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Posted on The Jerusalem Post
10/10/2011
By LISA PALMIERI-BILLIG
Angry protesters gather in Tripoli to demand deportation of Libyan Jew David Gerbi, who has been trying to reopen a sealed synagogue.
A few hundred angry protesters gathered in central Tripoli on the eve of Yom Kippur on Friday, calling for the deportation of a Libyan Jew who has been trying to reopen a synagogue sealed since ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi expelled the country’s Jewish community in 1967.
The protesters carried signs reading, “There is no place for the Jews in Libya,” and “We don’t have a place for Zionism.”
The crowds tried to storm Italian Libyan Jewish psychoanalyst David Gerbi’s Corinthia Hotel in central Tripoli. There was also a demonstration in Benghazi in the east of the country.
According to Gerbi, the crowd wanted to forcibly remove him from the hotel.
“They were impeded by hotel and Libyan security and government officials,” he said.
Gerbi said that National Security Adviser Abdel Karim Bazama, rebel leader Mustafa Saghezli, Interior Minister Ahmed Dharat and Justice Minister Muhammad Allaghi were among the government officials present at the hotel.
“The Tripoli crowd dispersed after Allaghi warned that any use of force on the part of the protesters would immediately result in strong international condemnation,” Gerbi said.
“He [Allaghi] reassured them the ‘problem’ would be resolved within 48 hours.”
The demonstrations were ignited by an attempt by Dr.Gerbi to clean the debris and pray in Tripoli’s abandoned Dar Bishi Synagogue. Dr. Gerbi had joined the National Transitional Council (NTC) rebel group last spring, first as a volunteer at the Benghazi Psychiatric Hospital and then joining and helping the rebels themselves.
“This incident has served to expose the dangerous reality simmering beneath the surface,” he said.
“I want to contribute to, not obstruct, the building of a new democratic and pluralistic Libya. It is sad and absurd that my mere presence in Libya, should set off so much hostility and I regret this,” Gerbi said.
“However,” he continued, “what happened reveals the extent of Gaddafi’s anti-Semitic conditioning of an entire generation, those in their forties and fifties. Forty-two years of lies, of hate propaganda falsely accusing Jews of having been paid off to abandon the country in 1967, of having robbed Palestinians of their homes and of planning to colonize Libya.”
“Fortunately, the older generation still recalls warm friendships with former Jewish neighbors,” Gerbi said, “and I will continue to work to restore a 2,300-year-old coexistence and advocate active roles in the NTC for Libyan Jews, for the Libyan Amazigh population, for women and all ethnic and religious minorities.”
On Sunday, after a personal meeting with Libyan and Italian diplomatic representatives, he agreed to return to Rome on Tuesday by military plane in order to ease the tension.
Gerbi said the Italian ambassador in Tripoli claimed that the controversy over his actions was strengthening the extremist wing of Islam in the current internal war in Libya between extremist and more moderate, liberal Muslim forces.
Gerbi had been told he was “complicating matters,” that “the time is not ripe for such actions” and that his security was endangered. In addition, his attempt to clean out the garbage littering the synagogue was defined as “breaking into an archaeological site without permission,” for which he received a police summons.
Gerbi said that as a Libyan Jew, whose citizenship papers were never renewed by the Gaddafi regime, he has “as much right to enter and pray in Jewish religious sites as the Libyan Muslim exiles who have returned have rights to pray in mosques. And there can never be a wrong time for guaranteeing civil rights and religious freedom.”
Italian Foreign Ministry sources said they are following the case closely and working internationally on long-range support for all of the basic principles necessary to the building of a democratic state, which, they said, takes time. They also advised Gerbi to leave now, as have the Libyan authorities, and return to the country at a later date.
Following up on recent correspondence with NTC President Mustafa Jalil, Gerbi is awaiting a final confirmation of the NTC’s acceptance of his bid to become a member of the new government and the country’s representative for Libyan Jewry.
One of the conditions posed for his election to Libya’s future government is that he not be an Israeli citizen. Gerbi is a native Libyan with an Italian passport.
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October 24, 2011
The Jerusalem Post 10/10/2011 By LISA PALMIERI-BILLIG Angry protesters gather in Tripoli to demand deportation of Libyan Jew David Gerbi, who has been trying to reopen a sealed synagogue. A few hundred angry protesters gathered in central Tripoli on the eve of Yom Kippur on Friday, calling for the deportation of a Libyan Jew who […]
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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.
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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.
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