Jews of Libya and the Holocaust (Harif, 18 April 2023)

On Yom HaShoah, we look at the impact of World War II on Libyan Jewry. Their plight deserves to be better known outside their own communities and their voices heard. From 1938, the Jews of Libya, who lived under Italian rule, were subjected to the Fascist racial laws. They felt the brunt of the back-and-forth World War II battles in the North African desert. Some ended up in Bergen-Belsen Mussolini ordered the expulsion of the Jews of Cyrenaica. Some were sent to a concentration camp in the western mountains of Tripolitania, where a quarter died from disease. Following liberation there were violent pogroms in Tripolitania. More than 90% of Libya’s Jews left for Israel, and the last Jews were forced to flee in 1967.
Vivienne Roumani-Denn is a film-maker, oral historian, writer and past executive director of the American Sephardi Federation.

[@cursor53]

This was very moving, heartbreaking in fact, and I feel historically important. The presentation and integration of information as to how conditions changed as the battle fronts changed is wonderful. I have always wondered how our people in North Africa fared, with the Nazis and their allies rampaging to and fro. My mother was a 7 or 8 year old living in Mogador (Essaouira) Morocco when the war broke out and was eventually was subject to the Vichy French. She still speaks of the wartime deprivations and state of fear they were subject to. In her later years she became a recipient of reparations from the Germans for that experience. Sadly, French citizenship was no protection for the Jews of France once the French capitulated, then collaborated. As for the British indifference to the vicious pogrom described. Winston Churchill in his massive five volume history of the Second World War makes only one mention of Jews. It is to say that his urging for the formation of a Jewish (Palestininian) army division got nowhere because of entrenched pro-Arab sentiment among the British officer class. That cannot detract from the sacrifice of all that lost their lives to defeat the evil of that time.