January 16, 2015
On Sunday, January 11, just two days after the attacks in Paris, hundreds of French Jews attended an information fair to learn how to emigrate to Israel. Calling it an “Aliyah” fair — a Hebrew term to describe the “going up” to Jerusalem — the Jewish Agency for Israel has told its staff to prepare for an onslaught of those Jewish French citizens who have finally decided, thanks to the shootings by separate radical Islamist groups on Friday, to get out of town while the getting is still good.
Two years ago some 3,400 Jews emigrated from France, while last year that number doubled to over 7,000. It is estimated that at least another 10,000 will leave in 2015, with some observers predicting that France’s total population of 500,000 Jews will shrink by 100,000 over the next several years.
The attacks on Jews, coupled with the government’s closing of Jewish shops in their neighborhood following those attacks, along with the enforced shuttering of the Grand Synagogue of Paris (the first time since World War II), is leading many to make the decision to exit the country.
Attacks have accelerated greatly just over the last year, and are now being brought to light. As Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the director of the Paris branch of the American Jewish Committee, exclaimed:
Hatred of Jews never ends.... Radical Islamists have struck violently, from the murders at a Jewish school in Toulouse two years ago, to repeated incidents of violence against Jews and synagogues in Paris, to the vicious rape of a Jewish woman in her own home, and today’s assault on a kosher supermarket in the middle of Paris.
Just a partial listing of such directed attacks against French Jews must include at least the following:
January 26, 2014: Protestors shouting “Jew, France is not yours!” at a street demonstration in Paris
March 2, 2014: A Jewish man is beaten while traveling on the Paris Metro by assailants who shouted during the assault, “Jew, we are going to lay into you! You have no country!”
March 20, 2014: A Jewish teacher is attacked leaving a kosher restaurant in Paris. After breaking his nose, his attackers drew a swastika on his chest.
May 15, 2014: A Jewish women was attacked while waiting for a bus in Paris’ Montmartre district by a man who violently shook her baby’s carriage and shouted at her: “Dirty Jewess! Enough with your children already! You Jews have too many children!”
June 9, 2014: Two Jewish teenagers walking with their grandfather to their synagogue in a suburb of Paris are attacked by four ax-wielding terrorists.
September 2, 2014: Two French teenage girls are arrested for planning to blow up a synagogue in Lyon. Intelligence sources said they were “part of a network of young Islamists.”
November 12, 2014: There were two separate attacks on Jews this day: a kosher restaurant is firebombed while a Jewish student was assaulted outside his high school.
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