That year, the Six-Day War broke out. Though Libya was not among the Arab nations engaged in warfare with Israel, many in the country sympathized with Egypt, Syria and Jordan through vehement anti-Jewish sentiment.
Anti-Jewish riots broke out in the streets. Jewish property was burned. In some cases, Jews were raped and murdered.
A Libyan “would be a hero if they killed a Jew in the streets,” recalls Waldman, who was among some 6,000 Jews living in Libya at that time. “It was open season on Jews.”
Waldman’s family had lived in Libya for generations. At the time of the Six-Day War, Waldman was 19 years old, temporarily back in Libya from boarding school in England and working for a British company in Tripoli.
One day, she received a call at work from her mother, who warned her daughter not to come home. A riotous crowd had surrounded the family’s apartment building, hearing that Jews lived there.
When a non-Jewish Egyptian neighbor upstairs tried to protect the family by saying they were out of the country, angry Libyans posted themselves outside the building, waiting for their return. It was clearly unsafe for Waldman to return home.
That’s when Foreman, a British engineer working for the same company as Waldman, stepped in. He and his wife, Deirdre, took the young Waldman into their home for several weeks, at times hiding her in the garage to keep her out of sight of their house cleaner, who often expressed hostility toward the Jews.
“They were very supportive, ” Waldman, now 48, recalls of the Foremans. “They hid me, talked to me, tried to encourage me. You can imagine the mental anguish I was in.”
Foreman, now a 63-year-old consultant living in eastern England, doesn’t think he did much at all. “All I was doing was helping somebody out,” he says simply.
His help did not end with taking Waldman into his home, however. When restrictions on Jewish travel from Libya relaxed in the late summer of 1967, Foreman used his connections at British Airways to secure Waldman and her family hard-to-acquire tickets on a plane to Malta.
However, on an early morning shuttle to the airport, events took an even more ominous turn.
About 45 minutes into the ride, the bus driver pulled off the road in a remote area, citing trouble with the vehicle. When Waldman debarked the bus to see what was wrong, she saw him pull a lever releasing the gasoline supply onto the ground surrounding the bus.
In a frightened daze, Waldman ran to a nearby gas station and called Foreman for help. She returned to find the driver with a book of matches in hand, apparently ready to set fire to the bus.
Moments later, in a scene with a Hollywood ending, Foreman and engineering colleague John Jackson showed up and whisked Waldman and her family to the airport. The family left Libya that day for Malta, eventually heading for Italy, where Waldman’s parents reside today.
Waldman applied for American citizenship at age 21 and came straight to the Bay Area, where she served from 1970 to 1982 as the first director of the Bay Area Council for Jewish Rescue and Renewal in San Francisco.
Waldman decided to search for Foreman after those who heard her story, including some at her synagogue, Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon, inquired about his whereabouts.
“Every time I spoke to kids about this story, the first question that always came up was, `Did you ever find these people?'” says Waldman, who is currently writing an autobiography.
After unsuccessfully trying to locate Foreman through government sources in England, Waldman ended up finding her rescuer through a serendipitous encounter with someone who knew him. The pair have exchanged faxes and phone calls, and Waldman hopes to make a trip to England this winter.
Resuming contact with Foreman was “very exciting,” Waldman says. “I want him to know how much we appreciate what he did.”