That job began Sunday, when he took a sledgehammer to a concrete wall. Behind it, the door to Tripoli’s crumbling main synagogue, unused since Col. Gadhafi expelled Libya’s small Jewish community early in his decades-long rule.
Mr. Gerbi knocked down the wall, said a prayer and cried.
“What Gadhafi tried to do is to eliminate the memory of us,” said Mr. Gerbi, whose family fled to Italy when he was 12. “I want to give a chance to the Jewish of Libya to come back.”
The Star of David is still visible inside and outside the peach-coloured Dar al-Bishi synagogue in Tripoli’s walled Old City. An empty ark remains where Torah scrolls were once kept. But graffiti is painted on the walls, and the floor and upper chambers are covered in plastic water bottles, clothes, mattresses, drug paraphernalia and pigeon carcasses.
He and a team of helpers carted in brooms, rakes and buckets to prepare to clean it out. » | Kim Gamel | Sunday, October 02, 2011
