Like other Jews in Paris, Rabbi Salomon Malka is shocked by the anti-Semitic attacks that have taken place on the edges of pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past two weeks in and around the French capital.
In the suburb of Sarcelles, known as “little Jerusalem” because it is home to 15,000 Jews, a kosher grocery and a Jewish-owned pharmacy were torched. A week earlier, a synagogue on Rue de la Roquette near the Bastille in central Paris came under attack while its congregation cowered inside. Demonstrators were heard chanting, “Death to Jews.”
Across the city, the Sephardic congregation at Rabbi Malka’s Berith Chalom synagogue on Rue Saint-Lazare — mostly Jews who fled Algiers in the 1960s — has escaped the violence, but not the tension. “They’re human beings, and they are aware of what is going on,” said Rabbi Malka, who has been rabbi here for 25 years. “They don’t understand at all why they are targets of this hatred.”
Rabbi Malka, 72, is convinced that the Middle East conflict is just a pretext for something deeper and even more alarming, and more peculiar to France.
“Those who demonstrate against Jews, what is their feeling towards France?” he asked. “That’s the question: Do they feel French or Muslim? The problem is not well understood, and we’re afraid to look at it in its face.”
In Rabbi Malka’s view, the Israeli assault in Gaza, with its mounting toll of Palestinian civilian deaths, has given an anti-Zionist cover to attacks against Jews, spread on the streets and on the Internet by an angry fringe of France’s Muslim population.
“Why bring a war to a country that is not at war?” he asked. “This conflict has nothing to do with the Jews and Arabs of France.”
He noted that the most deadly attacks in the region — against a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and a Jewish museum this year in Brussels, both committed by French-born Muslims — came about when there was no shooting war between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
“Anti-Semitism today is hiding behind anti-Zionism,” he said, “and hate speech has become uninhibited.”
This is not the first time that Rabbi Malka and members of his congregation have felt the sting of anti-Semitism. Rabbi Malka comes from the Moroccan town of Meknes, also once called “little Jerusalem” because of a sizable Jewish population that has since all but disappeared. Of the quarter-million Jews who lived in Morocco in the early 20th century, only several thousand remain.
Many left for Israel, but many others came to France, including Rabbi Malka, who arrived in 1970 to pursue his rabbinical studies. “We felt at home here,” said Rabbi Malka, whose mother, a schoolteacher, taught him both Hebrew and French. “French culture was in our veins.”
The synagogue on Rue Saint-Lazare was founded during an earlier migration of Sephardic Jews from northern Greece, who arrived in the 1930s also seeking the freedom and dignity that France then offered. That changed during World War II when Jews in Paris were deported to Nazi concentration camps, in roundups aided by the French police.
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In recent decades, the original congregation moved to the synagogue near the Bastille — the same one that came under attack on July 13.
“It’s unimaginable,” said Rabbi Malka, noting that the synagogue has a sign above its door honoring those who died in the Holocaust. “That’s a threshold that can never be crossed.”
After the clashes last month, which were joined by members of an increasingly militant Jewish Defense League, the French authorities banned two pro-Palestinian marches, both of which took place anyway. The resulting violence led to criticism of the government’s ban, which many viewed as a violation of France’s commitment to free speech.
Rabbi Malka applauds the French government’s strong stand against anti-Semitism, reiterated forcefully at a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of an extensive roundup of Jews in Paris. His loyalty to France remains unshaken.
“France has been a very welcoming land, and that may have come at a high price,” he said.
By CELESTINE BOHLEN