Name: Anonymous 2011-06-08 14:29
Italian Jew who left Libya in ’67 helps rebels heal PTSD
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=223795
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.
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=223795
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.