“October 7 had the function of calling for hatred which was heard by anti-Semites all over the world,” denounces the president of Crif

“The reality for Jews around the world has been a confrontation with a wave of anti-Semitism not seen since the Holocaust.“, assured Monday October 7 on France Inter Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, one year after the attacks perpetrated in Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

For a year, the president of Crif has felt a “immense feeling of vulnerability, as if there had been a regression in history, as if the Jewish people were projected into times where they were once again persecuted and potentially exterminated“. It describes a “open, gaping wound, which does not heal firstly because there are still hostages, the conflict still rages, but also and above all because in France, anti-Semitism exploded from October 7, 2023“.

A note from the National Directorate of Territorial Intelligence (DNRT) in fact mentions a 192% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in France between the first half of 2023 and the first half of 2023. The president of Crif explains that “this anti-Semitism reaches all levels of society“French. It thus evokes a “popular anti-Semitism made of anti-Semitic prejudices which we find over-represented among sympathizers of the extreme left, the extreme right and among French people who identify as Muslims“. Yonathan Arfi also notes “anti-Semitism among young people [via] social networks“, “a religious anti-Semite with the progression of Islamism” And “a political stratum” due, according to him, to a “cpolitical authority given by LFI to anti-Semitism”.

Yonathan Arfi was not surprised by the increase in anti-Semitic acts, which he sees as a direct consequence of the October 7 attacks. He describes this as “phenomenon of activation, mimicry“.”October 7 had a function of calling for hatred which was heard by anti-Semites around the world“, he regrets. The president of Crif explains that this “dynamic“had already been”at work at the time of the Toulouse attacks [en 2012] or Hyper Kosher“in 2015.”An initial anti-Semitic act causes new acts in the days and weeks that follow in France as elsewhere“, he adds.