More on French Jews making aliya [Hebrew: עלייה, "ascent" or "going up", in this context, Jewish immigration].
WHY ARE FRENCH JEWS LEAVING FRANCE?
September 12, 2006 (JPost) - While the reasons for making aliya vary from one family to the next, no one disputes the assertion that being Jewish in France has become more difficult during the past six years.... French intellectuals are unabashedly anti-Israel, and the French government has often displayed a pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian bias since Israel's resounding success in the 1967 Six Day War.
With the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, French Jews began to note a sharp increase in anti-Semitism with incidents and violent attacks unlike anything seen since the 1940s. Many of these incidents have been perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.
France's National Consultative Committee on Human Rights reported a sixfold surge in acts of violence against Jewish people, property and institutions from 2001 to 2002. In 2003, a popular Jewish DJ was brutally murdered in Paris, apparently by a radical Muslim youth organization. This was followed in 2004 by incidents. For example, a Jewish school bus was set on fire in Strasbourg; a concert by an Israeli singer in Macon was repeatedly interrupted by shouts of "Death to the Jews"; a 14-year-old boy wearing a kippa was beaten near the entrance to a Paris Metro station, with bystanders refusing to intervene; a female Jewish teacher was knocked down, beaten and trampled in central Paris; a University of Saint-Antoine medical school class was interrupted by four men shouting anti-Semitic threats and beating a Jewish student, while the class and professor looked on in silence; and a 12-year-old girl leaving a Jewish school was beaten by two men who carved a swastika into her face with a box cutter. Synagogues were torched, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, and Jewish institutions were vandalized, damaged or destroyed.
... Much of the impetus to leave France for new lives in Israel has come as the result of deep internal soul-searching among French Jews. Many of them have concluded that there is simply no future for them in France.
As Simon Kohana, president of the largely Sephardic Jewish Citizens Forum said recently, "We have begun to ask ourselves if we can even stay in France. Are we really French citizens? We have the feeling that we are a people apart."
Ironically, both settled Jews and warehoused Muslims share this same minority French experience of not being French.
... "France is not an anti-Semitic country," said Roger Cukierman, president of an umbrella group of Jewish organizations in France [Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France, CRIF = Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions], in April 2005. "Out of a population of about 600,000, some 2,400 people making aliya is not very many, in spite of all the talk about leaving."
The numbers are not huge (.4% of the Jewish populace by M. Cukierman's numbers). But we wouldn't expect them to be. It is the trend that should concern M. Cukierman.
The French Jewish community, even if kept apart, is long established in France. It is tightly knit, with its own social infrastructure. Any subtractions are disruptive. French Jews are not economic immigrants like the Maghreb poor. Leavings are more hardship than economic opportunity. They are refugees from violence and prejudice, fearing more of the same ahead.
There is simply no future for them in France.
PFFT (What is this?): Another French integration success 0 | Rayonnement français 0
Jews as a whole are not well-integrated in France? You must be kidding. In fact, most "integrated" French Jews I know would laugh at this idiotic statement.
France has an 82% favorable view on Jews, more than in the US (77%). On the other hand, it is true that more French have an unfavorable view of Jews than Americans do.
There are more than 600,000 Jews living in France, more than in any other European country. They represent about 1% of the French population. For comparison, 1.4% of Americans are Jewish .
