'Revolutionary Jew' to restore synagogue

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP):

An exiled Libyan Jew fulfilled his lifelong dream by starting the ambitious project of restoring Tripoli's main synagogue yesterday, crying as he broke down a concrete wall blocking the entrance and surveyed the damage.

David Gerbi was 12 when he fled with his family to Rome. It was 1967 and Arab anger was rising over the Mideast war in which Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. Two years later, Gaddafi expelled the rest of Libya's Jewish small community.

Gerbi returned to his homeland this summer to join the rebellion that ousted Gaddafi and he rode into the capital with fighters as Tripoli fell. He now wants to rebuild the destroyed Dar al-Bishi synagogue in Tripoli's Old City. He began yesterday, anvil in hand, by knocking down the wall blocking the door to the crumbling peach-coloured building inside the walled Old City after spending weeks getting permission from Libya's new rulers.

"He tried to eliminate us," Gerbi said of Gaddafi. "I want to bring the legacy back. I want to give a chance to the Jews of Libya to come back."

The Star of David is still visible on the outside walls and inside, faded Hebrew above an empty ark where Torah scrolls were once kept reads "Shema Israel" - "Hear, O Israel" - the beginning of a Jewish prayer.

But the floor and upper chambers of the building are covered in garbage - plastic water bottles, clothes, mattresses, drug paraphernalia and dead pigeon carcasses.

Gerbi has hired a team of residents from the neighbourhood to do the cleaning and help with the renovation. That is just the first step. The 56-year-old psychoanalyst has a broader goal of promoting tolerance for Jews and other religions in a new Libya.

The building, which sits in Hara Kabira, a sandy slum that was once Tripoli's Jewish quarter, has most recently been used to house impoverished Libyan families who are no longer there.

Jews first arrived in what is now Libya some 2,300 years ago. They settled mostly in coastal towns such as Tripoli and Benghazi and lived under a shifting string of rulers, including Romans, Ottoman Turks, Italians and ultimately the independent Arab state that was run by Gaddafi for nearly 42 years.

At its peak, the community numbered about 37,000 before it vanished.

Gerbi isn't sure how many Jewish properties were confiscated, but he said his next goal is to resolve that issue and build a garden memorial on the site of the former Jewish cemetery, which Gaddafi had covered with high rises and a parking lot.

Most of the other synagogues around the country have either been demolished or put to other uses. Some were turned into mosques.