Apparent Spillover of Mideast Violence Hits France Hard

In the cold drizzle of a dreary morning, Michel Mimouni looked on the charred ruins of the first synagogue so severely damaged in France since the Nazi occupation and struggled sadly to understand.

“It’s always against the Jews that such things happen,” said Mimouni, 62, president of the Jewish congregation of 30 families in this gritty working-class suburb southwest of Paris. “I try to figure out why, but I can’t.”

During three weeks of violence that have convulsed the Middle East, about 90 anti-Semitic acts have been registered across France, including Molotov cocktail attacks on synagogues and other Jewish sites.

North of Paris, in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, a gasoline bomb was thrown at the home of a Jewish family. In Strasbourg, near the German border, a bakery was painted with the words “Jews! Assassins” and a reference to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah, then torched.

In Venissieux, near Lyons, a group of young people rammed a synagogue with a car, then fled as the vehicle caught fire. In northeastern Paris, police discovered a stockpile of 16 crude firebombs hidden near a Jewish school. In Lille, near Belgium, a synagogue was pelted with stones.

A Call for Military Aid if Necessary

Police have arrested 35 people, including five local youths of Arab origin for the Trappes firebombing. But French Jewish leaders are still so jittery that they’ve called on the French government to send in soldiers if necessary to guard Jewish places of worship, as well as businesses easily identifiable as Jewish, such as kosher bakeries and butcher shops.

“If there are not enough policemen, then the army could be used to guarantee citizens’ liberties,” said Roger Cukierman, a member of the executive bureau of CRIF, the umbrella organization of French Jewry. “It is simply unacceptable that in our republic, people cannot worship freely or go where they want to.”

Not since World War II have so many and such widespread attacks on Jewish religious centers and property been reported in France. In 25 instances, according to a tally kept by CRIF, synagogues have been the targets of firebombs or other forms of attempted arson, break-ins, stoning or other types of attack.

There has been apparent spillover from the Israeli-Palestinian turmoil elsewhere in Europe. In Britain, a 20-year-old Hasidic theology student was stabbed about 20 times Tuesday as he sat wearing a skullcap and reading psalms on a London bus. A 27-year-old man, believed to be Algerian, was detained by police.

In Germany, the Frankfurt offices of Israeli national airline El Al were evacuated Wednesday after a telephoned bomb threat, police said. A synagogue in the industrial city of Essen reportedly was attacked earlier by Palestinian sympathizers, and another Jewish house of worship was stoned in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.

In Italy, authorities have stepped up security at synagogues, Jewish schools and other potential targets of terrorism.

‘It Gives Me Shivers Down My Spine’

But no European country has seen a greater number of ugly incidents than France, which has the continent’s largest Jewish and Arab Muslim populations. The most serious occurrence came in this town of 25,000 on the night of Oct. 10, when arsonists placed a large container of flammable liquid inside the two-story building on the Rue du Port-Royal that has housed the Trappes synagogue for the past 38 years.

The blaze gutted the interior, blackened the white stucco exterior and destroyed the red-tiled roof. Workers this week were busy hauling out charred rubble and nailing a green tarp to the rafters to keep out the autumn rain.

“This is the first synagogue burned in France since ‘45,” Mimouni said as police detectives sawed off a chunk of the entrance door for fingerprint analysis. “It’s like we’ve been wiped off the face of the Earth, and it gives me shivers down my spine.

“What do you do in a synagogue?” the stocky retiree with a salt-and-pepper beard asked aloud. “You pray, you meditate, you find peace. You don’t hurt anyone.”

To house the orphaned congregation, Trappes city government hurriedly offered a 2,000-square-foot hall, where Jews this weekend will celebrate Simchat Torah, the end of Judaism’s high holy days.

Though France has a long-standing streak of native anti-Semitism, the government’s domestic intelligence service, the Renseignements Generaux, has blamed the recent assaults for the most part on young people of North African origin angered by Israel’s response to the Palestinian uprising. French officials, including Interior Minister Daniel Vaillant, have played down speculation that the attacks are centrally organized, but some Jewish leaders are unsure.

Also alarmed at the upsurge in violence, the most influential figure among France’s more than 5 million Muslims, Dalil Boubakeur, has issued instructions to imams in the country’s 1,000 or so mosques to preach a message of tolerance and brotherhood.

“It’s a large part of Islam to seek peace in civil society,” said Boubakeur, rector of the Mosque of Paris. He blamed the arsons and other attacks on a tiny fraction of the country’s often unemployed Muslim youth, but made clear he believes that leaders of France’s more than 600,000 Jews are overreacting to a string of unrelated incidents.

“Our Jewish friends are worried, very easily worried, because of the war, the memories they have of anti-Semitism,” Boubakeur said. “The littlest fact can take on enormous--I’d say undue--proportions.”

Conversely, some Jewish leaders blame their country’s media for whipping up Muslims by portraying Israeli forces as trigger-happy brutes. They accuse French President Jacques Chirac specifically of discrediting the Israelis by objecting to the use of helicopter-mounted missiles and other battlefield weaponry against Palestinian civilians.

Two years ago, France celebrated its multiethnicity after its diverse national soccer team won the World Cup. Events of recent weeks have sparked much more sober reflection about the ethnic repercussions that a faraway conflict can have.

“France is one of the rare countries where [anti-Semitic] acts are taking place these days,” leaders of the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox faiths noted recently in a joint statement. “How could the French tolerate it? Do they have such a short memory?”

In an opinion poll printed this week by the Liberation newspaper, 75% of respondents said they thought Jewish-Muslim relations in France will be lastingly affected. To try to limit the damage, Education Minister Jack Lang on Tuesday sent a letter to the nation’s students stressing that equality and fraternity are founding values of the republic.

Recent days have brought a lull in anti-Semitic actions in France, but Jewish leaders as well as the police are wary. Authorities have tightened protection of Jewish sites.

What happens now, Jewish and Muslim leaders say, depends on whether Israelis and Palestinians manage to make a lasting peace.

In a statement, a number of French Muslim leaders, though insisting on full respect of the law and the faith of others, said they shared the outrage of their flock “at the brutality of the repression exercised by the Israeli army against Palestinians fighting for the recognition of their independence and national rights.”

“People in the Muslim community have been shocked by the pictures they have seen on television,” explained Boubakeur, the Mosque of Paris leader. “They have also been shown the path of anti-Semitic extremism. Next time around, it might be easier to take that road.”

“If events calm down in the Middle East, they will calm down here,” said the CRIF’s Cukierman. “If they become poisonous again there, they will become poisonous here.”