Israel expressed its “profound concern” on Monday following last Saturday's anti-Semitic attack against three youths in Villeurbanne, in southeastern France, stressing it was confident the French authorities would shed light on the facts, according to a statement from its ambassador to Paris.
“The Israeli ambassador to Paris expresses his profound concern in the face of Saturday’s attack on three Jews in Villeurbanne. These three people wore a kippa (Jewish skullcap) on their heads. It would seem that such violent attacks on French citizens of Jewish origin are brought about solely because of their ethnicity,” read a statement from his office.
The three Jewish victims were attacked on Saturday night in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, by about ten individuals who struck them with hammers and iron bars.
The police confirmed that all three were briefly hospitalised. One of the victims suffered an open wound to the skull, and another suffered an injury to the neck, according to the Ministry of the Interior, who denounced the act as “extremely serious” and “of a religious nature”.
The National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism said the attackers were of North African origin.
Investigations were under way and no suspects had been arrested.
A statement by French Interior Minister Manuel Valls denounced anti-Semitic acts as an attack on French society:
“These extremely serious acts are a deliberate attack against our Republic, which allows everyone, without exception, to live freely and in all safety in their religious affiliation,” read the statement.
His words echoed those of newly-elected French president Francois Hollande, who has promised to be “relentless in the fight against anti-Semitism”, as well as declaring that “security of Jews in France is not a problem of a particular community, it is that of the national community”.
Describing the Toulouse shootings as “a trauma for all of France”, he has previously stated that “it’s not up to French Jews to defend themselves but rather to the Republic to protect them. I will not let anything pass, anti-Semitic acts as well as words and more broadly anything that may contribute to a climate which would isolate Jews within their own country”.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Aurault added his condemnation to the Saturday's incident, declaring “it is very serious, it is intolerable violence”.
He added that "we must constantly fight against all forms of anti-Semitism, of racism."
French Jewish community leaders have also slammed the latest in a series of anti-Semitic attacks, coming in the wake of March’s well-documented Toulouse school shootings.
Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, the umbrella group of Jewish organisations in France declared himself “very angry” at the news:
“We haven’t seen such an increase in anti-Semitic acts since the time of Israel’s Gaza operation in January 2010,” he said.
He went on to slam Toulouse perpetrator Mohamaed Merah for having become “a sort of model, an example to follow” for similarly anti-Semitic sympathisers. He described the use of weapons in the Lyon attacks as likely to have extremely serious repercussion, adding that coming so soon after the attack on Jewish school Ozar Hatorah in Toulouse, it would make the wider Jewish community in France “anxious”.
According to Prasquier, data drawn in the wake of the high-profile Toulouse killings, makes links between the two attacks “indisputable”.
“In the weeks following the murders at Ozar Hatorah school, there was a considerable increase in the number of anti-Semitic attacks,” he highlighted, stressing the Jewish community security service’s own statistics in this matter were fully supported by those of the Ministry of the Interior.
“This increase is very important, reaching as it does the level of January 2009, when the (Israeli) operation in Gaza produced five times the usual numbers (of incidents), very often with clear intent, in the style of ‘Merah is a hero, we will avenge him’,” he explained, without providing more detailed statistics.
Returning to the specific example of Villeurbanne, Prasquier said “I think Merah’s name was chanted”. In his view, the fact that “a group of youths consider Mohamed Merah as a role model and hero is very worrying”.
“I’m not saying that he incited a large number of youths...but I know that on all sides, we have heard it said that a number of children, of students, had refused to participate in a minute’s silence which had been instituted by the Minister of National Education (in honour of the Toulouse victims)”, the CRIF president stated the day after the murders.
“There is in all this a climate...that’s conducive to a lot of anxiety for the Jewish community,” he stated, adding that for him the answer “cannot only be found in prevention (of future attacks), but it must no longer lie in complaisance”.
“In-depth work must be carried out to deconstruct radicalist movements who corrupt the minds of our youth, it’s a complicated but very important goal,” he concluded.