Pomegranates were eaten as a symbol of fertility. There were also sweet squash, dates and figs.
“There was a feeling of happiness and you kind of forget the atmosphere you live in, the oppressive surroundings,” said the Tripoli native, who was visiting her daughter in Tiburon from her own home in Rome.
“You rise above that. You have all these wonderful things on the table, and the house smells really nice. It’s a time for rededication and forgiving your friends.”
But figs also bring back less happy memories for Bublil, 68. Figs were the only food constantly available during the year she and her family hid from the Nazis in the outskirts of Tripoli. Bublil was 14. They lived in huts made out of palms, much like sukkot, the shelters built by Jews wandering in the desert.
Her mother was committed to keeping Shabbat, even in hiding. Every week, for Shabbat dinner, she would mash a dry piece of bread with a mortar and pestle to make it look like couscous.
Even back in their home of Tripoli, it was not easy living a Jewish life. In 1945 Libyan citizens began rioting, ransacking Jewish shops and homes. Bublil’s family was relocated to a school where the Red Cross and United nations brought food and clothing. Laura remembers being so fearful she lost weight.
“The fear has never left me.”
After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Libyan government no longer tolerated Jewish clubs and community centers, according to Bublil’s daughter Gina Waldman.
Jews were not allowed to emigrate. While Hebrew schools and Jewish community centers were not tolerated, religious observance was.
“If you wanted to go to synagogue on Yom Kippur they tolerated that. I think there was this underlying fear that [the Muslims] would be damned if they didn’t let us be religious.”
With no Hebrew schools, prayers were passed down verbatim from father to son. Influenced by Muslim traditions, the Jews of Tripoli did not teach women Hebrew and discouraged them from learning synagogue prayers.
Recently, Bublil prayed for the first time near the Torah, at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.
“I was very touched. It reminded me of when I was a little girl and I would go with my grandfather on Yom Kippur, and my grandfather would bless us [she and her two brothers]. But because I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed to get close to the Torah.”
During the High Holy Days in Tripoli families would buy extra chickens and give them to the poor. “The whole house would smell like burning feathers,” Waldman said.
Because there were no Jewish community centers or social service agencies, the tradition extended through the whole year as a way of performing tzedakah (charity).
The Jews of Tripoli had other innovative ways of taking care of each other. Each year on Yom Kippur, those who wanted to be blessed by a descendant of the Jewish priesthood known as a Kohen would pledge money to be used by the synagogue for tzedakah.
In 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, Jews were again being killed in the streets of Tripoli. Bublil and her family spent a month in hiding while their Egyptian tenant bought food and necessities for them. He also talked terrorists out of bombing the house, saying that Bublil’s family no longer lived there.
Recognizing that Jewish citizens were in danger, the Libyan government lifted its moratorium on Jewish emigration.
“They [government representatives] came to the homes of Jews and said, `Here is a passport. You can leave.’ Nobody said no,” recalls Waldman, who was 19 at the time. She and her family left for Rome. “I had mixed feelings of relief and fear,” Bublil said.
In Rome, the Synagogue of the Jews of Tripoli, which she attends, is guarded by police night and day because of a terrorist attack in 1982 that left a child dead.
The Libyan Jewish presence in Rome is small, around 6,000. “But we make our presence felt,” she said.
While feelings of fear remain with her, so do her memories of the sweetness of Jewish life from her childhood.
Her recipe for quince jam follows.