Bergen County–With more than 7,000 antisemitic incidents, including rapes and murders in France in the last 15 years, and a severe uptick in 2014, Jews began leaving France about nine years ago and continue to do so at an accelerating pace. This year, approximately 7,000 out of 500,000 French Jews made Aliyah, and in recent days, they have been increasing their inquiries at Jewish Agency events. But not everyone goes to Israel, many come to North America, and more than many refuse to leave France at all.
On Wednesday, Teanecker Laurent Cohen, an engineer/marketing manager and a board member at Shaarei Orah, and Bergenfield resident, Rabbi Ely Allen, Hillel Director at the Federation, YU and the Jewish Outreach Network, spoke to JLNJ about their French connections. Directly connected to France, they had their own experiences with antisemitism there. They offered their reactions to the massacres last week, and said they’re glad they don’t live there anymore.
Cohen said he left France for the US about 18 years ago as a graduate student, and returned to France regularly, when he worked for a French company from 2002-2010.
“Until I was 14, I grew up in a neighborhood with few Jews and did not feel any antisemitism but, when I was 15 I moved to a neighborhood of Paris that had a pretty large Jewish community.” He said there were about seven or eight other Jews in his class, along with Arabs and children from other minorities. The students had lively debates about what was happening in Israel during those years.
However, when Cohen went back to Paris in 2000, he said, “I could feel that the situation had changed.” He was called a dirty Jew while walking to shul. Some of his friends told him that his wearing a kippah in public was provocative; he had problems with his employer for taking off earlier for Shabbos in winter, and was chastised by his employer for brown bagging his kosher lunch. Not having to deal with that made him happy to be back in the States, where he rarely encountered that type of behavior. “People were looking at me differently, there was more hostility against the Jews and it was reflective of what was going on in Israel.” Yet when speaks to his parents, who are still in France, they don’t see any of these attitudes as being extraordinary. “They’re living in denial,” he said.
Cohen said what caused the change was that the immigrant population identifies with the Palestinians and the conflict with Israel, and that stirs them up. Last week’s events almost eclipsed the attack in 2012, with four dead at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish School. They were gunned down by an armed terrorist on a motorcycle, later identified as Mohammed Merah.
Cohen told JLNJ that he thinks the French people and French government are in denial about the violence, the beatings, arson, assault, rape, torture and murder, and refuse to recognize that these are acts of antisemitism. He quotes them: “It was someone (the victim) who happened to be Jewish but it was just juvenile delinquency.”
Realizing that the supermarket attack was antisemitic is a change, says Cohen, but he doesn’t think that there would have been this reaction if Charlie Hebdo had not been attacked first. He referenced the antisemitic rioting in Sarcelles, a suburb in Paris last July, just one of 16 separate such incidents. “There was no demonstration of solidarity.”
He said his reaction to last week is no different than it has been for the last 15 years. He fears for his family still living in France and is angry with every one of them, and with the French government, that he says isn’t paying attention to the terrorist watch list, and for not implementing security measures that should have been put in place. “There’s a real fear,” he said, “because there’s a real threat.”
Rabbi Allen has French citizenship and lived in France during the summers while growing up. He, too, still has lots of family in France. His family escaped to France from Northern Africa in the 1960s, because it was one of the few countries willing to take in refugees who lost their citizenship. “They have all purchased homes in Israel and they’re trying to sell their current residences and get out,” he told JLNJ, and added that the decisions were made before recent event.
He said his family lived in Marseille and that their synagogue was firebombed in 2002, and that what happened last week is no different than what has been going on in France for the last 15 years. “It’s been very clear that it’s not a very safe environment for us, and I think that’s was accented when the former chief rabbi declared that Jewish males should not wear kippahs in public because it had become a risk to one’s life.”
As to Jews leaving France, Rabbi Allen said the Jews aren’t leaving only because of fear. There are also economic reasons. “France has some bizarre tax laws for its wealthy citizens and they resent the immigrants, many of whom don’t work, many of them on welfare.” Resentment leads to violence.
The rabbi also admitted that he is skeptical about the future. Speaking of last week, he told JLNJ, “I can’t believe that this is going to be a long-lasting change in the French attitude. There’s too much of a clash of cultures right now for even the native French people to really know what to do at this time.”
Some have been supportive of the Jews but then France had an unofficial government vote to support recognition of a Palestinian state. “I don’t think they know what they’re going to do. I don’t think all of Europe knows what it’s going to do,” he said.
Rabbi Allen said actions speak louder than words and if the attack on Charlie Hebdo had not happened first, he doesn’t think there would be such a big world event for four Jews being killed in a supermarket.
There were some astonishing reactions. Although the word Jew was hardly used to refer to the Jews who were massacred, including a Jewish cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo, Jewish media reported 3,000,000 marchers in Paris led by world leaders, with Pres. Obama or a high echelon member of his administration conspicuously absent…While Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “crashed” the parade, when media reported that French President Hollande wasn’t enthusiastic about either of them being there. He feared the focus would shift to the Middle East, but events proved him wrong. Instead, Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, had already begun speaking out about French antisemitism before last week’s murderous terrorist attacks in Paris.
PM Valls told The Atlantic,“If French Jews were to flee in large numbers, the soul of the French Republic would be at risk.” And on Tuesday afternoon, in front of a full house of Parliament, he ripped into the government and the people and told them how disgraceful it is for antisemitism to be rearing its ugly head, yet again, in the country that emancipated the Jews in the 17th century.
“The revival of the antisemitism in France is a symbol of the crisis of democracy and the Republic,” he declared.
His voice shaking with emotion, he asked, “How can we accept that in France, we still hear about the death of Jews? How can we accept that people are killed because they are Jewish? …How is it that in some schools, we cannot teach about the Holocaust?”
He pointed out differences between the old and new hatred of Jews. “This is a new antisemitism, born on the internet, which advocates hatred of Jews and the loathing of the State of Israel….When the Jews of France are attacked, all of France is attacked, and so is the universal consciousness. We must never forget that,” added Valls.
He also said that there is a “fundamental difference between freedom of impertinence and antisemitism, racism, the advocating of terrorism, and Holocaust denial, all of which are crimes and that the courts must punish with more severity.” Blasphemy, he added, “is not a crime and never will be.”
Yet in reporting PM Vall’s speech on Tuesday, NPR never mentioned his comments about Jews and antisemitism. US President Jimmy Carter told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show that the attack on the supermarket was the fault of Zionist and Israeli policy. Valls, on the other hand, said that loathing Israel is antisemitism.
French President Francois Hollande called the terrorist attack and murders at Hyper Cache food market “an appalling antisemitic act, while in the US, at the State Department, Marie Harf, Deputy Spokesperson said Tuesday, “I am probably not prepared today to give you what a definition of antisemitism is. I’m happy to condemn statements we think are antisemitic or incidents that we think have an antisemitic possible motivation to them. But I also–I just don’t think that’s helpful dialogue. …But you’re right. There is an interesting discussion and debate about this, not just in France but in the United States and Germany and other places as well. But there’s never any justification for violence, certainly, no matter what the motivation is.”
By Anne Phyllis Pinzow
