4,700 police officers will be deployed at all 717 Jewish schools in France, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced Monday.
Moreover, France ordered 10,000 troops into the streets to protect sensitive sites after three days of bloodshed and terror, amid the hunt for accomplices to the attacks that left 17 people dead. Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the deployment will be fully in place by Tuesday and will focus on the most sensitive locations.
"The threats remain and we have to protect ourselves from them. It is an internal operation that will mobilize almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations," Le Drian told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
On Sunday, leaders of the French Jewish community met with President Francois Hollande who told them Jewish schools and synagogues will be protected "if necessary" by the French army.
"He told us that all the schools, all the synagogues will be protected, if necessary, on top of the police, by the army," said Roger Cukierman, president of CRIF, the representative body of Jewish Institutions in France.
The meeting between Jewish community leaders and the French president came two days after the latest deadly terrorist attack to target Jews. Four people were killed in an attack by Islamist gunman Amedy Coulibaly on a kosher supermarket Friday afternoon.
Terror began on Wednesday with a shooting attack on the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead, including journalists and police. That attack was carried out by two brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, acting on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The two were finally tracked down by French police on Friday and shot dead after a tense standoff in Dammartin-en-Goele.
Israel expects the number of French Jews moving there this year, which was already predicted to rise sharply from 2014's record level, to accelerate further after the killings at the Hyper Cacher grocery store, Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency, said Sunday his estimate for 2015 was 10,000 French immigrants, after 3,300 in 2013 and 7,000 last year.
"It will probably be much more than 10,000," he explained at a Jewish Agency meeting for French considering emigration.