NEWS STORY: Attacks on Synagogues Stir Uncomfortable Questions in France

c. 2000 Religion News Service TRAPPES, FRANCE _ A few blocks from the train station, past solid stone houses laced with autumnal trees, the blackened shell of the Trappes synagogue casts a grim shadow over this placid west Paris suburb. As a raw rain beats down, Michel Mimouni climbs over yellow police tape to point […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

TRAPPES, FRANCE _ A few blocks from the train station, past solid stone houses laced with autumnal trees, the blackened shell of the Trappes synagogue casts a grim shadow over this placid west Paris suburb.

As a raw rain beats down, Michel Mimouni climbs over yellow police tape to point out the charred roof, the black smoke stains spidering across plaster walls, and the blasted windows where a small pot of red geraniums still peeks out.


Earlier this month, the faithful gathered here to mark the holy day of Yom Kippur, said 62-year-old Mimouni, who heads Trappes’ tiny Jewish community of about 38 families. A day later, the small synagogue was torched, and left the town’s mostly North African Jews fearful that there will be more violence.

“What I would like to do is meet these people and find out what pushed them to this act,” Mimouni said.

“Everyone knows that when fire destroys, it destroys everything. Our entire community is shaken.”

So are many French, after a recent wave of anti-Semitic acts that many Jews claim is unprecedented since World War II. The attacks have stirred old fears of rooted intolerance here, along with new ones associated with France’s Arab immigrants.

More than 80 synagogues and other Jewish institutions have been set afire or vandalized this month in what is considered by some to be an ugly spinoff to the Middle East clashes. The attacks and graffiti-scrawled slurs have been coupled with a string of pro-Palestinian protests, in which demonstrators burned Israeli flags and hurled anti-Jewish slogans.

French police have arrested more than a dozen suspects, including seven at Trappes. They paint many of the perpetrators as street-bound Muslim youths, moved more by televised scenes of Arab-Israeli violence than by any political ideology.

Yet many here fear the Middle East’s problems are being exported to France,home to Europe’s largest populations of Arab Jews and Muslims. A recent poll published by the Liberation newspaper found three-quarters of French believe the Middle East crisis may permanently scar local relations between the two religions.

French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin have appealed for calm, saying a culture of intolerance has no place in France.


“We must not import the passions of the Middle East into our country,” Jospin said, in a television interview this week.

The incidents also stir up troubling memories in France, where government collaboration with World War II Nazi Germany, and the more recent rise of the rightist National Front party, has left an uneasy legacy. Today, painful questions are again being raised about whether deep-rooted anti-Semitism remains.

“Is France one of the few countries where (anti-religious) acts take place these days?” asked French Christian leaders in a statement this week. “How can this be? How can the French tolerate them? Are their memories so short?”

Some Jewish leaders charge that a right-wing slice of French youth have been involved in some of the recent anti-Jewish incidents, including the burning of Israeli flags. The acts are not isolated, they claim, but represent “a wave of anti-Semitism,” according to Ygal el Harrar, president of Jewish student community in France. “The Jewish community is very concerned because it sees a real flare-up of hatred and violence.”

Questions of lingering anti-Semitism have faced France before, most recently during the 1998 trial _ and conviction _ of Maurice Papon for his role in deporting hundreds of Jews during World War II.

An official from France’s wartime Vichy government, Papon later served under former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing in the 1980s.


Yet the country’s religious profile has also changed dramatically in recent decades.

With about 4 million Muslims of primarily North African extraction here,

Islam is now France’s second largest religion, after Roman Catholicism. The arrival of thousands of Arab Jews in recent years has also swelled a dwindling Jewish population to about 750,000 members. The Sephardic immigrants have opened dozens of new synagogues, and injected a new religious fervor into a community previously dominated by Ashkenazi intellectuals from Eastern Europe.

“The cultures are completely different,” said Catherine Whitol de Wenden, an immigration expert at the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris, referring to France’s two Jewish populations. “The Ashkenazi are very marked by the collective memory of the Holocaust. And the Jews of North Africa are much more supportive of Israel.”

Concern for the Middle East’s turmoil is evident even in tiny communities like Trappes, where Jewish leader Mimouni blamed much of the recent violence on the Palestinians. “For us Jews of the Diaspora, Israel’s existence is our security,” said Mimouni, whose parents are Algerian. “The day anything arrives in countries that might _ might _ become more anti-Semitic, we’ll have a place to go to.”

But that, he added quickly, is unlikely to happen in France. In Trappes, the town mayor has since lent the Jewish community a large hall to conduct their services until the synagogue is rebuilt. And long-time residents like Marie-Louise Chereau say they are loss to explain the arson attack.

“Unfortunately, when some of these young people see what is going on in the Middle East they become racist,” said the 69-year-old retiree. “It’s too bad, because we are for peace, and these sort of things don’t help.”

Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders across France have launched joint appeals for tolerance and calm.


(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

“We are condemning always aggressions against places of prayer. In Islam, the Koran forbids it,” said Dalil Boubaker, imam of the central Paris mosque, echoing sentiments voiced by many Muslim leaders here. “This is not our way,

not our tradition, not our religion. These acts are very marginal.”

The French government has also stepped up security around many Jewish religious and community buildings. But police were not present in front of the Trappes synagogue one recent morning, nor around several Jewish institutions in Paris’ heavily Jewish 19th arrondissement.

At the district’s Ohaley Yaacov synagogue, member Pascal Guetta said Arab youths have hurled rocks and eggs at the building, along with several Jewish schools nearby. Jewish teen-agers have also been attacked, he said, including the rabbi’s son. But the community’s requests for more police presence have so far gone unanswered.

Now he said, synagogue members have sent a letter of appeal to President Chirac. Jews from the district are also setting up a neighborhood watch.

“We’ve always had a few problems, but they were unimportant acts,” Guetta said. “The real problem will come if Jews start to retaliate, then things will start to get out of control.”

DEA END BRYANT

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!