For Jews, it isn’t just a safety issue

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, was wearing a yarmulke when I met him in June at a hotel near the Louvre. I’ve heard that Jewish American tourists coming to France have been counseled to wear baseball caps instead of yarmulkes to avoid becoming targets of anti-Semitic hate crimes. When I asked him about it, he raised his palms, smiled and said, “I am what I am.”

Cooper’s reaction was one in a range of responses to my questions about what American Jews think and feel about traveling to France, where anti-Semitism has reemerged into the open since the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000.

Attacks on Jewish schools, synagogues and cemeteries peaked in 2002, declined somewhat in 2003, then soared again in the first half of this year, when there were 135 incidents.

Every week, it seems, some new horror is reported in the French media, including the firebombing of a Jewish school outside Paris in November and the desecration late last month of Jewish tombstones in the Alsatian town of Saverne. On Aug. 22, a Jewish center in eastern Paris was set afire; the perpetrators drew swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on the building.

The number of U.S. visitors to France has dropped by more than a million a year since 2000, but there are no statistics on what percentages of that number are due to anti-Semitism, fear of terrorism in general, resentment about French opposition to the war in Iraq or the weakening buying power of the dollar in Europe.

Travel experts have their own opinions.

“Although I love France and have traveled there many times, I am sad to report that travel to France by Jewish people has declined,” said Sophia Kulich, a consultant for Westport, Conn.-based E&M; Travel, which specializes in Jewish-interest trips. “We booked only a few people there this year. I do not believe it is due to terrorism or the exchange rate, since we send many people to Italy, the U.K., Spain and Portugal.”

But Jo Goldenberg, French owner of a cherished deli in the old Jewish quarter of Paris on the Rue des Rosiers, scene of a 1982 bombing, thinks the anti-Semitism problem in France has been exaggerated. “There are tourists here anyway,” Goldenberg said.

Rachel Kaplan, president of Medford, Mass.-based European Jewish Tours, reported that one client wanted to make sure the cars used for getting around Paris weren’t marked with the company name.

“But the main deterrent for coming to France is the discrepancy between the dollar and the euro,” she said in a phone interview. “The whole anti-Semitism thing has been blown out of proportion. People in America don’t understand the context. The problems have occurred in places where tourists wouldn’t go.”

Violence against Jews and synagogues has occurred chiefly in the suburbs of major cities such as Lyon, Marseille and Paris, where young Muslim immigrants from North Africa -- poor, socially disenfranchised, increasingly radicalized and themselves the targets of racism in France -- are concentrated.

France is home to about 500,000 Jews (about the same as in all of L.A.) and 6 million Muslims, the largest population in Europe. Tension between these groups is unlikely to endanger the average Jewish American traveler, who wants to see central Paris -- the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre -- not the tough suburbs.

Nevertheless, the upsurge in hate crimes against Jewish targets in France and other European countries prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which monitors neo-Nazi activity, to issue an unprecedented travel advisory in April 2002, warning that Jewish visitors to France and Belgium should exercise caution. The center’s Cooper told me the advisory was partly aimed at pressuring the French government into taking more decisive action against the perpetrators of anti-Jewish hate crimes.

Since then, the center has seen increased diligence on the part of the government to bring those responsible to justice, intensified policing of potential targets and a heightened effort to educate the public about anti-Semitism and racism in general. By the spring of 2003, the advisory for France was lifted (though the one for Belgium remains in effect, and another has been issued for Greece).

Anti-Semitism in France is a profoundly complex and sensitive subject, entangled with historical events, such as the Vichy government’s deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II.

The question for Jewish travelers is, how will being in France make you feel?

Shelley Gazin, an L.A. photographer working on an exhibition and book about Jewish Paris, said she felt no fear on a recent visit to France, though the emotional issues were deep. “The history [of Jews in Paris] permeated my being,” she said.

A Jewish friend in New York who adores Paris said that visiting the city prompted a moral struggle. Another friend said only unsophisticated tourists would quail at the prospect of visiting France.

Everyone’s answer will be different. It’s a matter of listening to your head and heart, then weighing potential emotional and psychological discomfort against the indisputable pleasures of France, still the world’s most popular travel destination.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at www.latimes.com/susanspano. You may e-mail her at postcards@latimes.com. She cannot respond individually.