France is currently fighting a wave of anti-Semitic Attacks. In Alsace, 80 grave were smeared stones with swastikas. Elsewhere in the country the attacks. From Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, and Lisa Bryant.
Anti-Semitic desecration at the Jewish cemetery in the Alsatian town of Quatzenheim
As Maurice Rouffignat a few days ago – once again – on a desecrated Jewish cemetery, it felt to him like a journey into a dark, long since thought we had overcome in the past. “I have witnessed the Second world war as a child, the suffering, the deportations,” recalls the 84-year-old inhabitants of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, a small town on the outskirts of Paris.
Rouffignat itself is not a Jew, but the increasing anti-Semitic incidents in his home country make him angry: “We cannot accept these things just like that, this increasing racism and callousness.”
Very close, below a railway Embankment, had briefly held some local politicians flaming Speeches against intolerance and wreaths around the portrait of a smiling young man. At this point, a group of Muslim immigrants had dumped the 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, after they had tortured him before about weeks and abused. Because he was of Jewish origin, believed by his captors to a high ransom to blackmail him. But the family could not pay. Halimi died of his injuries on the way to the hospital.
Victim: The 23-year-old Ilan Halimi was tortured by a group of Muslim immigrants for a week
It is now 13 years. Since then, France experienced a wave of anti-Semitic Attacks, including the shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and the attack by Islamist terrorists on a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015. In 2017, a 65-year-old retired Jewish Doctor in Paris, was assassinated a year later, the 85-year-old Holocaust Knoll Survivor Mireille. Official Figures from the French government, according to the number of anti-Semitic crimes in 2018, has increased in comparison with the previous year to 74 percent.
“The government needs to do more against it,” says Rabbi Michel Serfaty, President of the national Jewish-Muslim friendship Association. “The fight against anti-Semitism cannot be left to the citizens and the municipalities. He must be elevated to a national question.”
This seems to have now also, the French government recognized: President Emmanuel Macron wants to meet in the evening, together with the heads of Parliament to the Paris Holocaust memorial. Under the Motto “enough of It” (“Ça suffit!”) are planned in Paris and other cities, rallies against anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism increasing in Europe
Because midnight while hardly a week passes in France without anti-Semitic Assaults: at the beginning of February, several posters were Survivors with images of the popular politician Simone Veil, a Holocaust, with swastikas smeared. Veil had already passed away in 2017. On Monday night, dam more than 80 Jewish grave collapsed in the Alsatian town of Quatzenheim Unknown stones with swastikas. This month, rioters were sprayed with the word “Jews” on the shop window of a Jewish bakery in Paris, the other destroyed trees at the memorial for Ilan Halimi.
This Jewish bakery in Paris was the target of anti-Semitic attacks
Last Wednesday, have been planted in a small ceremony at the same place in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois of new trees. However, many Present did not believe that the damage is not so easy to repair. “We are trying the violence small talk”, criticized the residents, Jean-Luc Mazet. “But the perpetrators of goads.”
France is not the only European country that recorded an increase in anti-Semitic acts of violence. Also in the UK and Germany the Numbers are rising rapidly. In December 2018 a study commissioned by the EU came to the conclusion that hundreds of Jews to 2018 in a dozen EU-member States, victims of verbal or physical attacks. A CNN study came to the result that the old resentments and prejudices have, for example, that “Jews have to much influence on the media, financial markets and policy” in Europe is still far to be widely used.
France houses the largest Jewish community in Western Europe. Of the more than 500,000 people living here-Jews, around 95 percent said that they kept the anti-Semitism in the country for a large or very large Problem. Some voted already with their feet – several thousand French Jews emigrated in the past years to Israel.
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One country, two reasons for anti-Semitism
Today, France has to fight according to experts, with anti-Semitism from two directions. For one, it’ll break itself in the Muslim, Arab and African countries, immigrants of the second Generation. The other old anti-Semitic images of the enemy were also within the framework of the government-critical yellow West-protests re-emerge.
Only last weekend, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut had been insulted on the sidelines of protests by the Yellow jackets. Vulgar anti-Semitic failures, but also against the President of Macron, a former Banker of the house of Rothschild. “These people have just been waiting for a reason,” says Rabbi Michel Serfaty. “It is the yellow vests, giving them the impulse, your anti-Semitic ideas.”
Jean Petaux, a political scientist at Sciences-Po Bordeaux, the yellow West is partly responsible for the increase in hate crimes – in particular the Internet, from which the movement draws its strength. “You have never distanced themselves clearly from anti-Semitism,” says Petaux, “and, therefore, have a clear complicity for the current political climate.”
Other experts were more cautious and noted that the number of anti-Semitic incidents had already risen before the Emergence of the yellow West movement. A clear responsibility is therefore difficult, because in France there is an information barrier to official statistics, which were perpetrated on the basis of ethnic or religious affiliations, says the well-known French right-wing extremism researcher Jean-Yves Camus. “The traditional French anti-Semitism is still commonplace, but the most serious anti-Jewish attacks were not perpetrated by the extreme Right, but of people with a migration background.”
Rabbi Michel Serfaty /(left) fights for years against the anti-Semitism in French society
Looking for a way out
The resurgence of anti-Semitic violence, many are concerned at the memorial ceremony for Ilan Halimi. They discuss possible ways out of the Situation. “I’m here to show my Protest, to show that we are Jews still here,” says the 19-year-old Jules Laloum, the, lit with a blue kippah on the head, just a candle next to Halimis Portrait. For him in front of all the hatred in the social networks had to be fought stronger. “But this is a very heavy.”
Rabbi Serfaty has been struggling for years against the anti-Semitism in society – on the street where he goes specifically in social focal points with a high immigrant proportion and also by Muslim volunteers is supported. But he also admits that his work is often tedious and frustrating.
He recently spoke with a teacher of religion, whose students responded extremely abusive, as she brought Judaism to the language. “She was completely at a loss what to do, because such an abyss of ignorance and prejudice she had never experienced before,” says Serfaty. “We need to educate our next Generation to be respectful, tolerant citizens who love the whole of France. Prejudices should have no place in our society.”