Outside the kosher grocery shops and grey apartment blocks of Sarcelles, a northern Paris suburb, a softly spoken teacher at a local Jewish school is discussing whether Jews in France should carry guns to defend themselves.
”Everyone is worried about anti-Semitic attacks and people don’t have faith in the police to protect them. Some have spoken to me about carrying arms. But what would I gain from carrying a pistol? Absolutely nothing,” Michael Amer says. He has not travelled on the Metro or suburban trains for four years.
”I look very Jewish. I have a beard, I wear a hat, a black suit. It’s not worth it,” he says. He has been verbally abused in the street for being Jewish and is afraid to let his children play by his apartment block known as ”La Petite Jerusalem”.
Sarcelles, which is home to 20 000 Jews — the highest concentration of any suburb in France — has found itself at the centre of a wave of national soul-searching about the country’s recurring problem of anti-Semitism.
Last month, a Jewish telephone salesman, Ilan Halimi, was tortured to death in an apartment block south of Paris by a large multiracial gang that kidnapped him for ransom. The gang allegedly singled him out because he was Jewish and ”Jews were rich”, telling his parents over the telephone that if they could not find the hundreds of thousands of euros demanded for his release, they should ask around at the local synagogue.
After Halimi’s body was found, with 80% burns, tens of thousands of marchers took to the streets to make a stand against anti-Semitism and racism of any kind. It was then that the attacks on young Jewish men in Sarcelles began — three in 24 hours, including a rabbi’s son who had his nose broken, and two other men wearing cloth skull caps who were reportedly called ”dirty Jews”. So disturbed was the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, that he immediately invited victims’ families to see him in a televised display of solidarity.
But it has done little to ease the fear and tension. France has Europe’s biggest Jewish community, totalling about 600 000 people. After the deportations of Jews during World War II and desecration of synagogues and graveyards in recent years, France is sensitive to the claim that anti-Semitism is endemic. The MP for Sarcelles, Dominique Strauss Khan, a Socialist with national ambitions, warned this month: ”Anti-Semitism in our country is growing and it would be wrong not to see it.”
Members of the Jewish community in Los Angeles are circulating a petition calling for French Jews to be welcomed in the United States if they do not feel safe in France. The police presence in Jewish areas has been stepped up recently.
The justice minister announced last week that convictions for racist and anti-Semitic crimes were up by 43%. Almost 4 000 incidents were investigated last year. The comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala was recently fined â,¬5 000 for inciting racial hatred for comparing Jews to slave traders.
In Sarcelles, the Jewish community says anti-Semitism is only one facet of France’s growing problem with all types of racism, the nihilism of the deprived suburbs and the sense that ”no one can live together any more”.
Mixed societies
The Jewish community in Sarcelles is made up largely of second-generation North African Jews. Many have relations who speak Arabic and are used to living in mixed societies, but in France they feel singled out for their religion. It is here that a Sikh is campaigning against the decree that all Sikhs must remove their turbans for driving licence photos.
Outside shuttered shops, crowds of teenagers stand around killing time with no prospects of jobs. In a bakery, one of the few shops still open, a baker from Tunisia sells food on credit. ”People of all nationalities live round here. We’re all brothers and sisters, people should respect each other.” He was shocked by the recent attacks. Not far from his shop is a synagogue behind walls, locked gates and closed-circuit television cameras.
Raphaël Taieb (26) is wearing a cloth skull cap on his way to synagogue but usually removes it in public. ”I’ve been stoned by children from apartment block windows for wearing it before,” he says. ”If in the year 2006, a Jewish man like Ilan Halimi can be tortured for three weeks in an apartment block in a Paris suburb and then be left for dead, there is something profoundly wrong with our society.
”Politicians only speak out to serve their own political agendas. There is a malaise, a weakness in a society that refuses to deal with it. I want to leave and move to the US, Canada or Israel.”
”There is no sense of future for us in this country. We don’t feel French any more,” another teacher says. ”The government speaks, but it does nothing to protect you. It seems you can’t be French you must always be tagged with Jewish, Arab, black or African first.”
In a kosher café, Jewish women are gathered around the radio listening for any news of further attacks. ”I won’t let my daughter down to buy bread any more,” says one mother. ”She’ll have to be inside at 5pm.” Another is saving up to move her family to Israel. ”It’s difficult but it’s my only chance,” she says as others question how she would find the money. Others speak of moving to Miami or French-speaking Canada.
Amir Lapid, who runs the Jewish Agency in Paris’s programme to help Jews moving to Israel, said the numbers moving are up by 25% from last year to 3 000. ”But people are moving to Israel for all sorts of reasons,” he says. ”They are not leaving because of a general mood of panic that France is unsafe.”
Marc Knobel, a researcher for the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, says: ”This is not just a Jewish question, it’s the result of a society that has become totally dislocated and disconnected from republican values. We are in a crisis where people can’t live together.
”I refuse to say that my country as a whole is anti-Semitic, but of course you can find anti-Semitic people … Some younger people think of the Jews as immigrants, not French people. They think Jews have a lot of power in French society and that’s not fair.”
Marylou Galpolsky, of the group SOS Racisme, says: ”In France nowadays you hear very racist things being said and no one counters them. People don’t think it’s wrong to say Jews are rich, blacks stink and Arabs are thieves.”
In Sarcelles, parents are paying for security guards and video surveillance at Jewish schools. Raoul Benaccoun, the head of police, says he kept his cellphone switched on all the time. ”There is a sense of fear out there and I just have to make sure I’m there to nip anything in the bud,” he says.
In numbers
There are 600 000 Jewish people in France, the biggest Jewish community in Europe. France is also home to the continent’s largest Muslim population, at five million.
A total of 3 685 racist or anti-Semitic incidents were investigated by French police, from vandalism of synagogues to physical attacks. The number of convictions for these crimes rose by 43% in 2004/05.
Forty-five percent is the estimated fall in the number of anti-Semitic attacks in the past year, according to the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, yet figures for violent attacks are six times higher than in the early 1990s.
Sixty-four percent of French people think anti-Semitism is on the rise in France, according to a survey published by Paris Match this month.
— Guardian Unlimited Â