Tuesday 18 April, 7:30 pm UK, 2:30 pm ET. 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 (The photo shows Libyan Jews returning from the camp in 1945).   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. She  has interviewed Jews from Libya and recorded their stories on the first website of its type. Her films,  The Last Jews of Libya (2007), narrated by Isabella Rossellini, and Out of Print (2013), narrated by Meryl Streep, have premiered at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. She is working on a book based on the oral histories she has collected.

Recording here.