France's Jewish community hope for change after attacks, unity marches

France’s Jewish community is getting used to armed police outside its schools and places of worship, but also fervently hoping that the weekend’s mass march for unity shows society is rallying to its side. Europe’s largest Jewish community was counting its dead last week after an Islamist gunman burst into a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris during the busy pre-Sabbath shopping period. Amedy Coulibaly killed four men before he was shot dead when police stormed the store to bring the four-hour hostage crisis to an end. Many of the half a million Jews who make the French capital their home say the attack brought back painful memories of earlier wounds. Even before the horrors of last week, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in France has doubled in a year. Among them were the kidnapping and murder of a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, in the Paris suburbs in 2006 and the shooting of three children and an adult in a Jewish school in the southwest city of Toulouse by Islamic extremist Mohammed Merah in 2012. [caption id=“attachment_2040807” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The gunman who attacked the supermarket. AP[/caption] A shaft of light was opened up by Sunday’s marches, which brought up to four million people onto the streets of French cities, including more than 1.6 million in Paris, to reject extremism. To the slogan “Je suis Charlie” which commemorated the cartoonists and journalists slain at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, many marchers added “Je suis Juif” (I am Jewish). “That was when France once again shone a light for the world,” said France’s chief rabbi Haim Korsia. “We have been waiting a long time for society to wake up. The fight against anti-Semitism, against terrorism and against Islamic extremism cannot be left just to the leaders, it must the duty of every citizen,” said Joel Mergui, president of the Jewish Consistory which represents religious bodies. Extremists ‘at our door’ On Monday, security was hugely increased around Jewish sites with 4,700 police officers posted at France’s 700 Jewish schools and at synagogues. Soldiers will join them within 48 hours. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked France for protecting Jews after he attended Paris’ central synagogue following the march on Sunday. But community leaders warned that deploying the security forces was not enough on its own. “We sent the army to Mali to fight Islamic extremists, but now they’re at our door,” said Elisabeth Ben-Nahim, who has a child at the Jewish school in Montrouge in southern Paris, just 100 metres from where Coulibaly killed a policewoman before his murderous siege. Parents at the school are convinced, even if the investigation has yet to confirm it, that Coulibaly’s real target on that day was the Jewish school. Still deeply shocked at what could have happened, several mothers said the policewoman’s courage in approaching Coulibaly could have prevented a slaughter – he fled the scene afterwards. “That woman saved our children,” several agreed. Seeking to reassure the community, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Monday visited the rue des Rosiers in the capital’s Jewish quarter, the scene of a 1982 attack on a restaurant that left six people dead. Among those there to see him was Sacha Reingewirtz, the leader of France’s Jewish students’ union, who said he felt “reassured” by the government’s actions but that “more must be done”. He cited the refusal of some schoolchildren to observe a minute’s silence for the victims and the fact that conspiracy theories about the attacks began to circulate “before the victims were even buried”. But Reingewirtz said he was “proud” of Sunday’s march – thought to be the largest in modern French history – and hoped it was the start of awareness on a national scale. Jews believe much needs to be done before they can feel safe in France and many are voting with their feet – almost 7,000 moved to Israel last year. Netanyahu appeared to encourage others to follow in his speech at the synagogue on Sunday. But others were heartened by the message from Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said on the weekend that “France without Jews is no longer France”. AFP