CRIF expresses its support for the recent victims of anti-Semitic acts

Just as they were about to enter the synagogue they were insulted by a young man, soon joined by six other residents from the housing estate adjoining the synagogue. The group began to violently beat up the father and his two sons, until the police arrived on site after being called by someone inside the synagogue. Even while he was being arrested, the author of the insults threatened one of the children with reprisals. The father of the aggressor, who came to see the Jewish father to ask him to not press charges, did not express the least regret for the event. Understandably, the Jewish father was profoundly upset by this aggression. Should he continue to press charges despite the threats, should he or his children continue to move around in a neighbourhood where they were now known and in danger, should they move out of town?

Over and above the cold figures, aggressions are human stories; over and above the physical consequences, there are the mental traces, the feeling of fear and the deep wounds caused by the memories of those terrible moments when the victims feared for their life, totally powerless in the face of spilled out hatred and physical force. Over and above the facts, there is the terrible backdrop against which they are set: the gangrene of brutal anti-Semitism, unashamed and unexplained, as if taken for granted, which today disrupts individual lives and tomorrow can lead to a tragedy that will brutally challenge the collective harmony of a nation’s citizens.

Another member of the community who the President of CRIF has also met with, had also been violently beaten up round about the same time, this time in the 19^th precinct of Paris. The aggressor who had insulted him for being a Jew, when confronted by the police claimed that he had been temporarily deranged and that he was not anti-Semitic. The victim spoke of the same sense of shock, the same inability to comprehend and the same worries as those expressed by the father in Garges-lès-Gonesse.

To both these men and their families, CRIF of course expresses its full solidarity and willingness to help. We want to put out a warning against the idea that anti-Semitism is on the way to being beaten: in certain places it is in fact all too commonplace.