(Author: David Gerbi, Vol. 76, #3, Spring 2021)
The history of Libya’s Jews stretches back to the 3rd Century BCE, through the 1492 Jewish expulsion from Spain and well into to the 20th Century. My community saw Romans, Ottomans, and Italians come and go. For hundreds of years, we coexisted peacefully with Libyan Muslims, despite tensions wrought by political upheaval. As recently as 1931, Libya’s Jewish community of about 24 500 people represented 4 percent of the country’s population. Subsequent wars and persecutions, however, decimated the community.
The trouble began in 1938, when a Nazi-inspired racial law against Jews led to heightened persecution. Hundreds of Libyan Jews were killed in riots during the decade that followed. By 1949, many Jews had been forced to leave after Libyans rioted again in reaction to the establishment of Israel. The remainder of the Jewish community, including my family, were forced to flee from Libya to Italy after the Six Day War of 5 June 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
In Libya, my generation grew up under the monarchy of King Idris, who after the pogrom of 5 June 1967 told us that he could no longer guarantee our safety as a Jewish minority and then helped us escape from Libya. The country had become extremely hostile to Jews, largely thanks to the propaganda of the nationalist Nasserite movement in Egypt. After the 1967 war, the Egyptian radio incited hatred against Jews and encouraged people to eliminate them. It was thus that the enraged mass congregated in the streets to rampage against Jews holed up in the dark in their houses and in utmost silence. They started burning houses and shops and killing many Jewish families.
I remember as a child when Jewish shops and houses were burned in front of my house. An angry crowd gathered in the streets screaming and proclaiming their chilling intentions with a hand gesture to the throat, shouting “Uh Uh al Jehud, Edbah al Jehud” (slaughter the Jews, death to the Jews). In silence, in that hot summer, we remained hidden, inside our houses with the windows and shutters completely closed, suffocating from the heat and petrified with fear.
The Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), the largest Jewish humanitarian organization in the world and the HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) assisted us in leaving the country and helped us recuperate by providing us with a one week stay in a hotel in Rome. In Italy we received UNHCR refugee certificates. In Israel, Jews were welcomed not as refugees but as new immigrants and received Israeli citizenship and benefits, both for study and for work.
By 1969, with Muamar Qaddafi in power, only about 100 Jews remained in Libya. At that time, Qaddafi confiscated the assets and possessions of all Libyan Jews, including those who had left in 1967 and earlier, and declared that Jews could not return or renew their passports.
Meanwhile, my family and members of my community built a new life in Rome. In 2002, I was granted permission as a relative and as a psychologist to return in 2002 to visit my elderly aunt, Rina Debach, in a Tripoli hospice. We had though that she was dead. In exchange of allowing my aunt to leave Libya and join the family in Rome, I first had to help Libya to normalize relations with the US through the support of the late chief rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff, Elie Wiesel and the Jewish lobby in Washington. After that three-month trip (entirely at my expense), I reached the office of the late congressman Tom Lantos, who initiated the normalization process. After more than a year of patient work to build peace between the US and Libya my aunt, after being held as a virtual hostage, was finally permitted to leave in 2003. She joined our family in Rome, where she died just 40 days later and was taken to Israel for burial. She could not be laid to rest in her birthplace, Tripoli, because the Jewish cemetery there had been destroyed by the Qaddafi regime. Today, there are buildings and a highway in place of the 2000 year-old Jewish cemetery where my relatives and ancestors are buried. She was the last Jewish person to leave Libya, and her departure marked the end of more than two millennia of continuous Jewish presence there.
While not one Jew lives in Libya today, the original Diaspora population of 38 000 has grown to about 200 000 people largely residing in Israel and Italy. Since my visit in 2002, I have made several further trips to Libya as part of reconstruction and reconciliation efforts on behalf of the Libyan Jewish community, acting as a representative for the World Organization of Libyan Jews (WOLJ). In 2007, I was invited back by the Libyan government as a gesture of gratitude because of my help in the normalization of Libyan-US relations. All I asked in exchange was for the restoration of Jewish sites of importance and the building of a memorial. I began the process of obtaining authorization to restore Tripoli’s Dar Bishi Synagogue, which dates from the late 1920s but has deteriorated badly over time. Unfortunately, after a positive start and a constructive atmosphere, the Qaddafi regime ultimately made my work impossible: I was abruptly detained, interrogated and, without any reason or explanation, dispossessed of all my belongings and deported from Tripoli to Malta.
In June 2009, I met Qaddafi when he visited Rome and invited the Libyan Jewish community to meet with him. Attending in my traditional Libyan robe, I pressed him to give us permission to restore the Dar Bishi Synagogue and erect a memorial for all the Jews who are buried in Libya, in particular Tripoli and Bengazi, where the Jewish cemeteries have been wantonly desecrated. In 2011, I went to Bengazi with Italian government representatives to help people who were traumatized by the old regime and by the Arab Spring. During my last two trips to Libya during the spring and summer of 2011, I volunteered at the Benghazi Psychiatric Hospital, where I had trained to treat patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After several months, I also went to the mountains northwest of Tripoli, working on PTSD among the Berber community. Like most Libyans, their suffering resulted not only from the current conflict, but from 42 years of calamities caused by the dictatorship. What they desperately needed was to overcome their fears and restore hope for a better life.
I wrongly thought that Libya’s revolution would offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for real democracy and respect of freedom of religion and restore the Jewish community into my homeland’s social fabric. However, I was shocked to be faced by a mob shouting antisemitic slogans and perpetuating the hateful sentiments that Muammar al-Qaddafi encouraged. That mob wanted to seize and kill me and thwarted my efforts to restore the Dar Bishi Synagogue. After Tripoli was liberated, I once again tried cleaning up the synagogue. Even though I had received permission from the National Transitional Council (NTC) and the local government to undertake this, a mob gathered, shouting that “there is no place for Jews in Libya” and carrying signs in both Arabic and Hebrew to make sure, I suppose, that I got the message. Once again, I had to leave.
Despite all these challenges, I still nurture hope that a stable Libya that affirms freedom, justice and the rule of law, protects freedom of religion for all its people and honours its Jewish heritage will come about. I will continue to do what I can so that the Jewish presence in Libya is not forgotten and Jews, as well as all minorities, can reclaim their rightful place in the country. I know that this will take time. Tripoli’s new leadership faces enormous challenges, such as building the essential elements of government and civil life and bridging ethnic and regional divides. But part of this effort must include preserving and protecting Libya’s few remaining Jewish heritage sites.
Hope often needs help. The international community must also act; not only in helping Libya’s people achieve freedom, but also by trying to steer the new regime toward a path of justice and reconciliation with Libyan Jews. It can send a message to the Government of National Accord and other Libyan leaders that they can demonstrate their seriousness about democracy and human rights by breaking with Libya’s past and welcoming back Jews and other minorities. The US under President Biden should thus focus not only on economic and political development, but also on human rights. As we so often have seen, the way countries treat their minorities signals how they will behave toward their neighbours and the world at large.
History teaches how the Arab countries, enraged at the failure to prevent the United Nations Partition Plan on 29 November 1947 and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel, declared war not only on the new Jewish state, but also against the peaceful and thriving Jewish communities that had lived among them for over two millennia. Thus were thousands of years of Jewish history and culture erased.
The UN must formally recognize Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Palestinian refugees must obviously also be helped, but there is an imbalance between the attention paid to them and to Jewish refugees. Over the past seventy years, the whole world has heard about the Palestinians. Member states of the UN have consistently cared about and stood up for them, but have done virtually nothing for us. A pall of silence and denial has been drawn over our suffering.
After centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence, communities in Syria, Libya, Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere have been all but obliterated. Unfortunately, we are the forgotten refugees. Our stories are not heard in the European Union meetings nor do we ever see, exhibited in the corridors of the United Nations, photographic exhibitions commemorating those communities. Among the thousands of resolutions discussed and adopted by the UN since its formation seventy years ago, none addresses our communities, our families, our dear ancestors or the theft of our assets.
I remember a Libya of rich and diverse cultures, of different ceremonial rituals, of successes, prosperity and flowering of customs, sounds, tastes and smells. I have childhood memories of the three monotheistic religions that once lived in peace. We only went to school four days a week because Friday was a day of rest for Muslims, Saturday for Jews and Sunday for Christians. The displaced members of our Libyan community have successfully resettled in Italy and elsewhere and gotten on with their lives, without languishing in squalid camps plotting revenge. Today located in various areas of Rome, there are seven synagogues observing the Sephardic rite of the Jews of Libya that preserve and pass on Libyan traditions. In Israel there are more than eighty Libyan synagogues. In both countries, we have kosher restaurants where Libyan foods may be enjoyed and food stores where one can find the spices and food typical of the Jews of Libya.
I continue to devote myself to the search for justice, and to the fight for respect for human rights. My commitment is also to raise memorials in Tripoli, Bengazi, Homs, Yefren and Jado in honour of their vanished Jewish communities, to restore the four cemeteries and the three synagogues, with the hope that one day the miracle of peace and stability will occur so that we can freely visit the place of our roots. A peaceful, stable Libya is most likely to be realized if it is pluralistic, open, and tolerant. Libya must become a free, just, and democratic country, grounded in the rule of law, in which all Libya’s minorities — including those forced to flee — are welcomed back into the Libyan family. We can make a difference at this critical juncture, before the cement dries, by making a mark for democracy, human rights, and religious pluralism, so that Libya becomes a model for reconciliation and tolerance.
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Dr David Gerbi is a Jungian psychologist, psychotherapist, analyst and a writer. For many years he has acted as the representative of the World Organization of Libyan Jews. This article first appeared in the Italian Jewish community newspaper Pagine Ebraiche in January 2021, and is published here in the author’s translation.
