Escape From France

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The New York Sun

The escape of Jews from France, which has been picking up pace in the past decade, “may soon reach much more important proportions.” That is the prediction in an important dispatch by the French newspaperman Michel Gurfinkiel and issued this week by Pajamas Media. The prediction comes eight years after Prime Minister Sharon of Israel publicly called on Jews to get out of France and fewer than four months after three Jewish school children and their teacher were murdered at Toulouse.

It turns out, Mr. Gurfinkiel reports, that the killings at Toulouse, while denounced at the highest levels in the Fifth Republic, have actually increased anti-Semitic tendences in France. Even Jewish leaders who have sought a modus vivendi in France are warning that young Jews no longer see a future in the country. This is a story one isn’t getting from the major newspapers or from our own state department.

Mr. Gurfinkiel quotes a rabbi at Paris as telling him: “Any time young people approach me in order to get married, I ask them various questions about their future. Eighty percent of them say they do not envision any future in France.” Mr. Gurfinkiel wrotes that he has heard “similar statements from other French rabbis and lay Jewish leaders.” He quotes a leader at Lyons as confiding to him, “We have a feeling the words are on the wall now. It is not just our situation in this country deteriorating; it is also that the process is much quicker than expected.”

Even the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, “may be sharing that view now,” Mr. Gurfinkiel reports. A few weeks ago, he notes, the chief rabbi “suddenly warned Jewish leaders” about a “growing ‘rejection’ of Jews and Judaism in Franee.” The chief rabbi has linked the trend to what Mr. Gurfinkiel characterizes as “the global passing of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in French society as a whole.” Mr. Gurfinkiel also reports on the connection between Muslim immigration — or what he calls Muslim-influenced immigration from the Third World — and “the rise of a new anti-Semitism” that has become a fact “all over Europe.”

It is not that the leadership of the new socialist government of France has been silent. On the contrary, Mr. Gurfinkiel credits President Hollande and the interior minister, Manuel Valls, “for taking the present anti-Semitic crisis seriously.” Mr. Gurfinkiel calls that “a noted departure from the ambivalent attitude of the last socialist administration of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ten years ago.” On July 22, the “seventieth anniversary of the “grande raffle” (“great round-up”) of Jews by the Vichy government police in 1942,” Mr. Gurfinkiel reports, the new premier “drew a parallel between the Toulouse massacre and the deportation and mass murder of Jewish children during the Holocaust.”

Mr. Valls, Mr. Gurfinkiel reports, has not only repeatedly acknowledged the upsurge of anti-Semitism in France but, on July 8, “went so far as to stigmatize the ‘most stupid, most dangerous new anti-Semitism’ brooding among ‘young and not-so-young people’ in the ‘neighborhoods.’” It was, Mr. Gurfinkiel writes, reference to Muslim enclaves. He called it “quite a bold statement, since the Socialist party and the Left at large primarily derive their present electoral edge in France from the Muslim vote.” Valls and his staff may also have inspired several no-nonsense reports on anti-Semitism that were recently published in the liberal, pro-socialist press.”

Mr. Gurfinkiel reports that since Toulouse there have been no fewer than six cases of aggravated assault on Jewish youths or rabbis in France. He quotes the Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations as reporting that anti-Semitic incidents of all sorts have increased by 53% compared to the year earlier period. One phenomenon Mr. Gurfinkiel marks is that “Muslim anti-Semitism reactivates in many places a dormant, but by no means extinct, non-Muslim European anti-Semitism.” If Muslims are unchecked when they question the Holocaust or cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he notes, “a growing number of non-Muslims feel free to do the same.”

When Ariel Sharon issued his famous call for the Jews to get out of France while they could, he was challenged by the Quai D’Orsay, which makes our own state department look like the Council of Torah Sages. With every passing month, however, it becomes apparent that, as Mr. Gurfinkiel puts it, the “second half of the 20th century was a golden age for French Jews.” Their numbers soared, to 700,000 from 250,000, and there was what he terms a religious and cultural revival. The only shadow was the “anti-Israel switch engineered by Charles de Gaulle in 1966” that he reckons was in part “a consequence of a more global anti-American switch.” Today the number of Jews at France is probably below 500,000, and Mr. Gurfinkiel sees the 21st century “a much darker age.”


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