Published
Video length: 2 min
Anti-Semitism: Increase in attacks worries Jewish community
Many French people of Jewish faith are seeing increasingly open hostility towards them and fear physical violence. Some are choosing discretion, and are talking about a dangerous confusion between their Jewishness and the attacks carried out by Israel.
(France 2)
Many French people of Jewish faith are seeing increasingly open hostility towards them and fear physical violence. Some are choosing discretion, and are talking about a dangerous confusion between their Jewishness and the attacks carried out by Israel.
As she left a kosher grocery store in Paris, a Jewish mother discreetly slipped her purchases into her stroller, out of sight. “I always hide my bags where it says ‘kosher’. I either turn the plastic bag inside out or try to hide it.”says this young woman, who prefers to remain anonymous. Three months ago, she was attacked in a taxi.
“He heard me on the phone say something like ‘Shabbat’ or something that made it clear that I was Jewish. And right away, he started driving very fast. He got very angry in the car and I asked to stop the race right away. He called me ‘dirty Jew’ and I got out right away.”she confides. She was eight months pregnant. Since then, she has used a pseudonym on private transport platforms. In this district of eastern Paris, where a large Jewish community lives, a shopkeeper speaks of the community’s fear. “When they come, they ask me not to sit on the terrace, because they are afraid.” In Villeurbanne (Rhône), a man deplores the confusion made with the war led by Israel in Gaza.
