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French connections

Portrait of a community under siege

NADINE JOSEPH

Evelyn Sitruk poses in the sanctuary of the synagogue in Marseille. She has experienced anti-Semitic incidents in this Mediterranean port city. Photo courtesy of the Jewish Investigative Journalism Fund

Evelyne Sitruk always envisioned Marseille as a model of tolerance and diversity amid stodgy, stratified France, a Mediterranean port of 800,000 with a cosmopolitan mix of Italians, Armenians, some 70,000 Jews and North Africans. Now she finds it downright hostile.

"I was strolling with my family at Pesach," she recalls, "and for the first time in my life, someone spat on me and called me a sale Juive (dirty Jew). It was like a slap in the face."

Marseille may be Le Pen country - one in four voted last month for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultrarightist leader who inveighs against immigrants and has called the Holocaust "a detail of history" - but the aggressor was an elderly Arab.

With her lavender beret, dangling silver earrings, checkered scarf, black and purple stockings, and henna-colored hair in a Dutch-boy cut, Sitruk looks more Berkeley than Brooklyn, although she is Orthodox, 48, and the sister-in-law of France's grand rabbi. A Socialist active in politics, she serves on the city council, volunteers as president of the Jewish library and teaches public school.

"I always identified first as a French citizen and as a Jew," she says.

Her Jewish identity remained private, as lobbying and communautarisme (single-identity issues) are frowned upon. Lately, the label "Jew" sticks to her, not just on the streets as a venomous epithet. At a rally against Le Pen, a city council member accosted her with an almost accusatory question - "So where is your grand rabbi?" - as though she, as a Jew, was responsible for producing him.

Political discussions often stop when she enters the room. "If you're Jewish, everyone assumes that you support (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon," Sitruk says. "How many times have I heard Juif, c'est pareil, (Jew, Sharon, it's the same thing)."

Anxiety is gripping French Jews. They've seen synagogues ablaze, cemeteries vandalized and walls painted with swastikas as they face what observers have called the worst spate of anti-Semitism since World War II. Hate crimes rose from just one in 1998 to more than 700 in the first five months of 2002. Observant Jews live in a state of siege. Police now patrol in front of the Jewish schools. Graffiti and swastikas appear almost nightly in Strasbourg. Rabbis exhort congregants in Marseille to cover their kipas (yarmulkes) in public. Jewish men guard the front of synagogues during services, walkie-talkies in hand, revolvers hidden in their pocket. Parents forbid their sons to play soccer because of a vicious attack in Paris.

In two dozen interviews conducted in French with Jews in Paris, Marseille and Strasbourg during a two-week period in mid-May, a portrait emerges of a complex French Jewish community splintered by the specter of anti-Semitism. The Jews of France became unified briefly in fighting Le Pen. With that threat over, the ongoing anti-Semitic events have exposed differences along fault lines of religious observance, social class, politics, age and origins. The debate, a fierce one, is now centering on how to respond to anti-Semitism among Muslims, the anti-Israel bias in the media and security for Jews on college campuses.

The government's initial reaction to the wave of anti-Semitic incidents - a refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem - was almost as shocking as the violence itself. On its heels came Le Pen's surprising success in the first round of presidential elections. Finally, a controversial letter by Socialist Party adviser Paul Boniface exposed what many Jews fear is France's new political reality: politicians are wooing Arab Muslims who outnumber France's 600,000 Jews 10 to 1.

The largest population of Muslims in Europe, French Arabs rallied around Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after the second intifada started in September 2000. After Sept. 11, many proclaimed Osama bin Laden their hero. The pro-Palestinian stance, tinged with virulent anti-Americanism, has spread beyond the "cites," or housing projects.

The No. 1-selling paperback in France - "L'Effroyable Imposture" ("Extreme Fraud") by Thierry Meyssan - alleges that the U.S. government faked the Pentagon crash with a bomb as part of a larger conspiracy to create justification for an invasion of Afghanistan.

Since Sept. 11, there's also more blatant discrimination against Jews. "It's no longer politically incorrect to be openly anti-Semitic," says Edith Bismuth, communications director of Marseille's Council of Jewish Communities (CRIF), an umbrella organization for secular French Jewish groups.

Turned away at a beauty parlor she had frequented for years, one young woman was told, "We don't want to take care of you people anymore." When confronted, the owner retorted, "Yes, I'm anti-Semitic and what are you going to do about it?"

The young woman filed a complaint under the Gayssot law of 1990. That law punishes those who incite racial hatred, support Holocaust revisionism or slander with racist or anti-Semitic insults.

Despite the Gayssot law, hate crimes target Jews nearly everywhere. In Creteil, a suburb of 82,000 outside Paris, a third of the residents are Jewish and a third Muslim. The town boasts six kosher restaurants, more than in Strasbourg or Toulouse. Residents lived in relative peace until the new intifada began some 20 months ago.

David Kessel, a 47-year-old artist, believes that some of the violence could have been avoided had the town's mayor reacted to the first hate crime 18 months ago. Kessel asked the mayor to intervene when Arabs harassed a Jewish family living in their midst and burned the car of friends who were visiting for Shavuot. The mayor, like other French political leaders, minimized the incident as "merely an act of juvenile delinquency."

In the last few months, Creteil has been the scene of several incidents: a Hebrew school classroom was torched, the synagogue's glass windows were smashed and tzedakah (righteousness) boxes were stolen. Last month, Jews found an anti-Semitic tract in their mailboxes.

"We're anguished about whether to stay in France," says Kessel, an Orthodox Jew whose father survived a hanging in Auschwitz and the death march to Mauthausen. "We don't have our place here anymore."

Jews like Kessel and Sitruk feel betrayed. As they see it, the French government shrugs off responsibility and Jewish leaders won't push, denounce or threaten.

"The Jewish community," says Sitruk with sadness, "is not very politically hip. It votes for the candidate who seems to support Israel the most and avoids thinking of the big picture."

One problem lies in identifying the source of the threat. To many, the resurgence of anti-Semitism appears to come from the right - with Le Pen's showing of 18 percent in the second round of French presidential elections. But much of the hate flows from the left. Young radicals in checkered keffiyah headdress shout intifada slogans and accuse not only Israel but French Jews of racism and genocide.

"We belonged to the left, but now we've had to break off," says Yael Boussidan, a Conservative Jew in Strasbourg.

"It's the first time we sit on the bench of the accused," adds Michel Benoilid, a high school teacher.

Some believe that most of the vandalism comes from disaffected, young Arabs. Felix Mosbacher, 64, president of Mouvement Juif Liberal de France, a Reform synagogue in Paris with 1,400 families that recently experienced vandalism, notes the upsurge in vandalism tracks the second intifada. Mosbacher, a Harvard MBA, is careful to point out that the cause is not black or white. But he observes that the intifada gives many young Arabs of North African families, who feel neither French nor part of North African Arab culture, a group with which to identify. This is anti-Semitism, says Mosbacher, but the French government doesn't like to apply the label.

"They would like to imagine France is one society. It's not," he says.

Not all Jews agree. Some Jewish intellectuals, leftist politicians and journalists ally themselves with the plight of Arabs. The most assimilated and least religious Jews feel as comfortable as ever in France.

"I don't see that things have deteriorated in France, so that you can see anti-Semitism or feel it," says cancer researcher Marc Lipinski, 48, a member of the Green Party and of the city council in Vanves, a town of 25,000 outside of Paris.

Eric de Rothschild, 61, president of the Rothschild Foundation, worries about anti-Semitic incidents in the suburbs but notes that "statistically, non-Jews are targeted as often as Jews."

"The Jewish community in France," he adds, "has reacted as forcefully as it should, without resorting to hysteria and threats."

Older French Jews side with de Rothschild. Mostly Ashkenazim, they minimize recent acts, clinging to optimism reinforced by their own experiences. After all, they survived the Holocaust in France. They find comfort in the fact that fewer Jews from France - 76,000, or 25 percent - were exterminated than from other countries.

The younger Sephardim, more religious, often less wealthy, grouped in ghettos next to Arab neighborhoods, take issue with this rosy view. Since they moved from North Africa after the 1960s, they have always felt like second-class citizens, slightly suspicious of a government that betrayed them when it abandoned its colonies. The hate crimes caught everyone by surprise.

"We asked for government protection for the first time since World War II," says Bismuth of Marseille.

"We were certain that synagogue burnings were part of our somber history, far in the past, and we were all wrong," echoes Pierre Levy, 60, CRIF's regional delegate in Strasbourg.

Strasbourg, home to 15,000 Jews and Europe's first Yiddish Institute, represents a case in point. The Jewish community had become complacent. Until recently, it had to press members to attend yearly organizational dinners.

"Our grandfathers were already very bleu-blanc-rouge, very patriotic," says Levy, who fought in Algeria with the French Army. "French Jews have always identified as French Jewish citizens with the accent on French 'citoyens.' Over the past few months, there has been a remise en cause, a questioning of identity. People are asking themselves, 'Am I French?' And the answer is a resounding, 'Yes. Yes, we are French, but we must be more vigilant.' "

Next week, in part two of Joseph's investigation of French Jewry, she considers whether the violence the Jewish community is facing is a new form of anti-Semitism, addresses the Jewish community's indifference and investigates how the media has created tension between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.