Gina Waldman had remembered Maria as a slender girl with dark hair and an outgoing personality. But other than a few more scattered memories, the 52-year-old Tiburon resident didn’t remember much else about her childhood friend.
She did, however, recall growing up in the Libyan Jewish community of Tripoli, which her family fled more than 30 years ago, with unsettling thoughts about the society’s oppression of women.
“Women were basically told to stay in their place and have babies,” said Waldman, the former director of the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews and now devoted to various volunteer causes. “Being educated, for a woman, was more of a threat than a value. It’s all that lost potential that is the most distressing to me.”
But during a recent visit to friends in Paris, an extraordinary coincidence gave Waldman a chance to freshen some of her recollections and create new, more positive memories.
One friend, a cardiologist and philanthropist, mentioned his plans to meet with a woman, originally from Libya, who was raising funds for an Israeli hospital. The woman, a Tel Aviv resident, turned out to be Waldman’s old friend Maria.
As president of the Latin Friends of the Assaf-Harofeh Medical Center in Israel, Maria Aron Rokah travels the world spreading word about the hospital, which serves the military in times of war and peace. And like Waldman, Rokah operates completely on a volunteer basis.
“There she was, on the other side of the globe, raising money for her cause,” said Waldman, whose family fled Libya in 1967 when the Six-Day War resulted in rampant anti-Jewish sentiment.
“I guess something must have clicked in both of our heads — that staying at home was not the role of women.”
Waldman called Rokah from Paris and learned that even more coincidentally, Rokah had plans to bring her fund-raising campaign to San Francisco.
The two women — Waldman, a recipient of the Marin County Human Rights Commission’s Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award in 1992, and Rokah, chosen as one of 10 Women of the Year in Business Administration by the United Nations Congress in Beijing in 1997 — were finally reunited.
Last month, they spent three days together, catching up on the present and recalling episodes from their distant past. Sometimes they even spoke in their special Tripoli tongue, a mix of Arabic and Italian.
“It’s our own Judeo-Italian,” quipped Waldman, explaining that the Italian influence infused the language after Mussolini conquered Libya in 1940. “The only people who would understand it are Tripoli Jews — certain expressions aren’t translatable.”
The women also turned to business, discussing the Assaf-Harofeh Medical Center with Mark Reisbaum, grants manager for the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Endowment Fund.
“I feel a real connection to Maria,” said Waldman. “Doors were not open to us at all when we were young and it’s been hard to get them to open. But here we are today, and the work we’re doing is making a difference.”
Waldman’s present focus is on helping Bosnian refugees, raising money to send children to summer camp and helping adults with their acculturation. She has been doing this volunteer work for five years through the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services, which recently honored her.
Rokah, who said in a brief telephone interview from the San Francisco International Airport that she was delighted to be reunited with Waldman, continues her work for the hospital.