At least 18 Jews have been killed during the past two weeks in Libya by rampaging Arab mobs and some 4,000 others have barricaded themselves in their homes in Tripoli, an Italian journalist reported today.
Giorgio Fattori, reporting in La Stampa, said that 6,000 Jews live in Tripoli and that “more than 1,000 are for the moment safe in the Gargaresh Barracks outside the city.” Several hundred other Jews with foreign passports are protected by their embassies. This information left 3,000 to 4,000 “hiding in the city,” he estimated.
He also reported that Libyan police were stopping assaults on Jewish homes but doing nothing to assist the Jews, who have been barricaded for 13 days. If they leave their homes in search of food or medicine, “they risk death,” the journalist wrote.
(In Geneva, Chief Rabbi Alexandre Safran asked the International Red Cross to intervene in behalf of the Jews in Egypt and their rabbis who were arrested at the outbreak of the war and were reported held in Cairo and Alexandria prisons under very bad conditions.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
