France Vows Harsh Action After More Synagogues Burn,
( 400 anti~semetic incidents this last year)
France Vows Harsh Action After More Synagogues Burn
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Shooting in France in Wave of Anti-Jewish Attacks (April 1, 2002)
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Belgium
Jospin, Lionel
Anti-Semitism
France
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ARIS, April 1 — A rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents prompted a sharp government reaction today after a synagogue in Marseille was destroyed by arson and another in nearby Belgium was damaged when five firebombs were thrown inside.
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced that 1,110 extra police officers would be deployed to guard France's synagogues and Jewish schools.
"Any act of anti-Semitism, no matter what the pretext, will be extremely firmly pursued and cracked down upon by the justice system," he declared from the steps of his Hôtel Matignon offices this evening after a meeting with Jewish community leaders.
Attacks on Jews and Jewish buildings have soared in the last year. They appear to reflect the growing radicalization and anger of France's large Muslim population, numbering about five million, as violence in the Middle East has increased and Israel has applied growing military pressure on Palestinians.
Three French synagogues were set on fire over the Passover-Easter weekend, which ended today, a public holiday. Besides the Orthodox Or Aviv synagogue in Marseille, which was burned to the ground, one in Strasbourg had its doors set ablaze the day after an anti-Israel demonstration, and in Lyon, 15 masked men crashed two cars through the gates of a synagogue and set them afire.
Shots were fired at a kosher butcher shop near Toulouse, though no one was injured, and a young Jewish couple were badly beaten in Villeurbanne, in the Rhone region.
The Central Jewish Consistory in Paris, in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse, compared the weekend's attacks to "the beginnings of a new Kristallnacht, with the government totally passive." Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, on Nov. 9, 1938, was named for the sweeping attacks on Jews and Jewish shops and places of worship incited by the Nazi Party.
Police officers, some carrying submachine guns, are now posted outside dozens of synagogues and Jewish schools, mostly in and near Lyon, Marseille, Paris, Strasbourg and Bordeaux.
Until recently, leaders of France's 600,000 Jews have said that they do not find France an anti-Semitic country. But they have complained that there has not been enough of a public outcry over earlier attacks, the anti-Semitic graffiti appearing on walls and the threatening phone calls received by rabbis.
Some Jewish leaders have argued that France's foreign policy is pro-Palestinian and effectively encourages attacks by young Arab thugs. Their Belgian counterparts complain that leftist politicians are increasingly anti-Israel.
The French government argues that it condemns all violence and bigotry and that its Middle East policy is even-handed. The Foreign Ministry has recently condemned both Israel's occupation of Yasir Arafat's compound and Palestinian suicide bombings.
The Palestinian Authority's representative in France, Leila Shahid, told a French radio station today that the Palestinian struggle was strictly national and that it is "unacceptable to attack Jewish religious sites or Jewish places of commerce in France or elsewhere."
President Jacques Chirac, on the campaign trail hoping to be re-elected, visited a synagogue in Le Havre to show his solidarity with French Jews.
"These acts are unimaginable, unpardonable and unspeakable and should be pursued and condemned as such," he said outside after the service. "They infuriate France and the French." He called on the government of his rival, Mr. Jospin, to do more to protect Jewish institutions.
Mr. Jospin, who returned today from a campaign stop in French territories in the Carribean, called his interior minister to the Hôtel Matignon and this evening announced that six companies of the national riot police would be guarding synagogues.
In Marseille this afternoon, several thousand Jews marched through the streets carrying the fire-damaged Torah scrolls from the Or Aviv synagogue in the Caillols neighborhood.
The scrolls were on stretchers covered with white cloths, and men in yarmulkes and the broad felt hats of Hasidic sects pushed through the crowd to touch them briefly.
The synagogue itself, a 20-year-old prefabricated one-story building frequented by 600 familes, was a crumpled mess of girders, concrete and corrugated iron today. This morning, congregants wept as the ark containing the Torah scrolls — cracked open and badly charred by the blaze — was carried outside and set upright on a burned kitchen chair.
Forensic specialists moved in and out of the bits of the building that still stood. The police did not officially give a cause for the blaze, but an all-news television channel reported that they had found evidence of arson.
The synagogue, in a wooded copse a bit remote from the rest of the neighborhood's low apartment buildings, burned very quickly and, to judge from the collapsed steelwork, intensely. A police patrol had apparently passed it just before midnight, only about an hour before the blaze and saw nothing suspicious, a commander said.
Congregants outside this morning were upset, pressing on the gates of the pale blue spike fence for news and denouncing the destruction, especially of the synagogue's library, as a sacrilege.
"I've lived with anti-Semitism because during the war, my parents died in Auschwitz," said Robert Mizrahi, honorary president of the synagogue. "Now I feel I'm living with it again. And I think it's absolutely necessary to try to stop it now, or we'll be overwhelmed."
Zvi Ammar, president of the Jewish Consistory of Marseille, pronounced himself "crushed and disgusted," as he stood outside the ruins. Another firebomb was thrown against the building's wall last year, witnesses said.
"We want to live in peace," Mr. Ammar said in a televised interview. "We want the state, the public authorities, to assure our security. We're citizens, too."
Yvan Ollivier, police prefect for the region, asked for calm and said he had assigned 120 officers to protect 59 local synagogues and schools. Mr. Jospin's announcement came later.
The grand mufti of Marseille, Soheib Bencheikh, condemned "these barbarous acts," adding: "Our natural and spontaneous solidarity with the Palestinian people, who submit to daily murders and humiliations orchestrated by Israel's bloody and vengeful leaders, cannot let us forget two undeniable truths: Jews and Arabs have shown, across their long history, an astonishing capacity to live together.
"And we are in France, a country ruled by secularism, where the only possible way to engage is in a calm and constructive dialogue."
In Brussels, the floors and pews of an Orthodox synagogue were damaged when five firebombs were thrown inside, the police said. The three-story building of brown brick and white Romanesque windows stands on a busy street in Anderlecht, a working-class neighborhood with a large Arab population. Cinders and broken glass could be seen on the sidewalk below the window smashed by the bombers, but the chandeliers inside were still lighted.
The mayor of Anderlecht, Jacques Simonet, told Belgian radio that he ascribed the attack to "a hostility which means that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is exported to some of our tougher neighborhoods." |
