Exiled Libyan Jew Eying Post-Gadhafi Future
The leader of the Libyan-Jewish community in Britain said that he has been invited to run for political office in the post- Muammar Gadhafi era.
Raphael Luzon told the Jerusalem Post Tuesday, a day after the fall of the Libyan capital Tripoli to rebel forces, that opposition leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil has invited him to return to Libya and run in free elections.
Jalil is a former Libyan justice minister and now chairman of the rebel council in Benghazi.
Luzon told the newspaper that he was invited to take part in the elections “because they would like it to be open to all people including women and Jews.”
Luzon, whose family fled Libya in 1967, met Gadhafi twice in recent years.
He said he would await further developments in the country before making a decision.
Luzon told the Jerusalem Post that reconstruction of the war-torn country and the restitution of Jewish assets confiscated by the Libyan regime would top his political agenda.
Fighting continued in the Libyan capital on Tuesday, centered on Gadhafi’s fortified compound.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
