Some Jews Do Believe They Have a Strong Future in France

For Jews, France has always been a country of paradoxes. On one hand, it freed them from Europe’s historic bondage...

The post Some Jews Do Believe They Have a Strong Future in France first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A wreath left outside the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris on Jan. 16, 2015, to pay homage to the Jewish victims of the Islamist terror attack. Photo: U.S. Department of State.

For Jews, France has always been a country of paradoxes. On one hand, it freed them from Europe’s historic bondage of religious and cultural oppression. On the other, France has been unable to unshackle itself from the chains of antisemitism.

“We see it as our duty and in our interest to fight antisemitism because it ensures and strengthens the continuation of French democracy and the promotion of human rights,” said Yonathan Arfi, president of the Jewish community’s most influential political organization, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France. “We understand the weight of our heritage and responsibility.”

In his office hang pictures of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain who was wrongly convicted of treason and publicly humiliated because he was a Jew (he was later vindicated).

Everywhere you go in Paris, the echos of the past are carried by the living Jewish community. In the Great Synagogue of Paris, Rabbi Moshe Sebbag pointed to the fact that Dreyfus was married in the synagogue and, not long after, Theodor Herzl himself visited and crossed paths with storied Jewish leaders like the Rothschilds and Maurice de Hirsch. Their nameplates can still be found on their reserved seats at the front of the synagogue. The Dreyfus affair inspired Theodor Herzl, who was living in Paris, to imagine and draw up plans for a Jewish state. While the Rothschilds were buying up property in the Holy Land for Jewish refugees, Herzl’s famous pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” was printed by a member of Sebbag’s congregation in the late 1800s.

One month after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Sebbag’s congregation hosted Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, for a massive community event to celebrate Israel’s independence.These events hardly register outside France. But the Jewish community lives and breathes the beating heart of history in this place. The 24-year-old vice-president of the Union of French Jewish Students, Sarah Ouakil, described the challenges Jewish students face on university campuses here. Many are harassed. Some are fearful to wear a yarmulke or other Jewish identification, such as a Star of David. There are those who choose to attend private universities, where they feel safer.In this very place, over 70,000 French Jews were shipped to death camps, such as Auschwitz. Some of them even shared the same last name as me. Yet here we are in 2023 and, despite a minor lull in reported violent antisemitic crimes, Jews have once again gotten used to living in fear.

The murders of Jews at a school in Toulouse in 2012, at the Hypercacher market in 2015, and, most recently, of Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll, motivated many Jews to leave. But in the last number of years, community leaders say they feel that government and public sentiment is on their side. After the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terror attacks, public sympathy for the Jewish community has grown, according to people I’ve spoken with here.“It’s no different than anywhere else around the world,” said Rabbi Moshe Lewin, a key advisor to the chief rabbi of France and vice-president of the Conference of European Rabbis. This might explain why there has been a reduction in the number of Jews leaving France for Israel, after reaching a peak in 2016. “We are back to normal levels of emigration,” Lewin said.

These are the waves of time that the community here has learned to ride. “We would not have built this massive community building,” said Lewin of Paris’ new European Jewish Center, “if we did not believe in the future of French Jewry.”

Arfi concurs: “I would not be raising my children here if I didn’t think they had a strong future.”

Still, Richard Odier, director-general of Fonds social juif unifié, a Jewish welfare organization, said that, “Doing memorials like the Holocaust is all very well and nice, but we need to address contemporary issues like antisemitism and Islamic radicalism.”

It’s the Jewish community that is on the vanguard of fighting hate and intolerance and preserving freedom and democracy. One of the community’s quiet heroes, criminal defense lawyer Ilana Soskin, dedicates all her spare time to fighting antisemitism and hate. Her recent trial against four French neo-Nazis who planned violent attacks against Jewish and Muslim institutions ended with significant convictions.

It was a win, in her eyes, for human rights and the preservation of freedom and democracy in France. It was also a demonstration of the renewed commitment on part of the government and French society to fight extremism and hate. And of the strength and determination of the country’s Jewish community — a community that has faced much adversity, but is striving to create a better future.

Avi Abraham Benlolo is the Founder and CEO of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative, www.agpiworld.com. A version of this article was originally published by the National Post.

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