On December 1st, a young Jewish couple were the victims of a horrific attack in the Paris suburb of Créteil. Jonathan (last name withheld), 21, and his 19 year-old girlfriend were alone in his family’s apartment, in ‘The Port’ neighbourhood of the suburb, when three men rang at the front door in the early afternoon. The three intruders, armed with an automatic pistol and a pump-action shotgun, tied up the young man and then repeatedly raped his companion and ransacked their apartment before fleeing with items they robbed.
Two men with criminal records were arrested in a nearby district shortly afterwards, when a police patrol found them in possession of some of the objects stolen in the apartment. They later confessed to the attack, indicating that they targeted the apartment because its occupants were Jewish, which, in their opinion, meant they were rich.
Both men are now in preventive detention and placed under investigation for gang rape, armed robbery, sequestration and extortion and violence motivated by religious prejudice. The hunt for a third man involved in the attack ended on December 24th, when the identified suspect was arrested in the south-central town of Saint-Etienne after a routine ID check.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The attack in Créteil, which lies just south-east of Paris, has become something of a horrific symbol of a surge in anti-Semitic violence in France. Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who visited Créteil shortly afterwards, denounced a “grave situation” in which “anti-Semitic acts have risen by 90% in France in recent months”. Cazeneuve announced that the fight against anti-Semitism was henceforth to be regarded by government as “a major national cause”.
However, interviewed by French television channel France 3 two days after the attack, the president of the Créteil Jewish community’s representative council, Albert Elharrar, said: “I wouldn’t qualify that as being truly anti-Semitic, that’s clear.” In November, Mediapart, which had begun interviewing the local population about the problems of anti-Semitism several weeks before the crime in The Port neighbourhood, asked Elharrar about the rise in the number of reported incidents in Créteil. “Why talk about that?” he asked. “You’re going to pour more oil on the fire.” But for many Jews in Créteil who Mediapart spoke to this month, the December 1st attack is an example of a situation that has been getting ever worse, and that it is time to call anti-Semitism by its name.
On May 24th, two brothers, Raphaël et Yeoshoua (last names withheld), aged respectively 18 and 21, were on their way to a local synagogue, wearing the kippah Jewish head dress, when they were attacked by two youths who swung punches at them, one wearing brass knuckle plates and who fractued Yeoshoua’s cheekbone. On November 10th, just a few weeks before the young couple was attacked, a 70 year-old Jewish man was beaten up at his home by three men, when nothing was stolen. In a statement, the local public prosecutor’s office said the crime was motivated by religious hate. “Can you realise that, beating up an old man?” asked Créteil rabbi Aain Sénior, who says he can see a growing disquiet among the local Jewish community. “There was the plausible and the possible, now the worst is possible in Créteil.”
Dina, 61, (last name withheld) has lived in Créteil for 30 years. Mediapart met her at a public gathering organised by the Representative Council of Jewish Organisations (CRIF) on December 7th following the crime in The Port neighbourhood. “I’m worked up, I’m angry,” she said. “We were waiting for stronger reaction this summer after what happened in Sarcelles,” she added, referring to a suburb north of Paris where anti-Semitic rioting broke out during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in July, when a Jewish-owned chemists’ was firebombed and a Jewish owned grocery store was ransacked. She says she does not understand that the events did not create a wake-up call in France. “You get the impression that is becoming banal,” said another woman, standing beside her, and who bemoaned the fact that not many people had turned up for the meeting that Sunday morning. “We’re afraid for our children,” added Dina. “It brings back memories of another time.” Dina says she is alarmed that in school playgrounds in Créteil, there are reports that Jewish children have been called “dirty Jews”.
The fears of the Jewish community are demonstrated in the daily precautions many take, like Carole (last name withheld), a Jewish mother of two. “I am not the fearful type, but in the evenings I lock my door with the key,” she said. Steve Cohen is a practicing Jew who has lived in Créteil for 15 years. “We’ve told our son not to wear his kippah in the street,” he said, adding that his son’s religious school was a distance of three metro stations from home and "he doesn’t dare take his mobile phone out in the metro”. Stéphane Touati, an inhabitant of The Port neighbourhood, says he finds the atmosphere locally to have become increasingly strained. “There are suspicious looks,” he said. “I wouldn’t dare to put on a kippah in the street.”
Old Arabs and Jews are 'the last who speak together'
Many of those Mediapart spoke to see a notable deterioration in the situation over the past ten years, especially affected by the abduction, torture and murder of 23 year-old Ilan Halimi in February 2006, and the point-blank shooting murders of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse by Islamist-inspired gunman Mohammed Merah in March 2012, and the murders of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May this year, carried out by French national Mehdi Nemmouche.
When interviewed about their personal encounters with anti-Semitism, members of Créteil’s Jewish community cite these shocking events as important chronological markers. “Inevitably we think of the Toulouse killings when dropping our children off at school,” said Claire (last name withheld), the mother of a boy in primary school. “For sure, after a thing like that the atmosphere is colder,” commented a security guard in his thirties, who asked for his name to be withheld and who, for the purpose of this article, has been given the name of Arié. “But one must also stop living in psychosis. Sometimes, I correct my parents and even my friends. You shouldn’t exaggerate the dangers. In any case, if you live in fear, you don’t go out anymore.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Until recently, Créteil, with an estimated Jewish population of 22,000 out of a total of 90,000 inhabitants, was something of a model of peaceful coexistence between its different communities. The Jewish community, the majority of who are from families who once lived in North Africa, arriving in France in the early post-colonial period of the 1960s, has seen a rapid expansion alongside the worsening climate of anti-Semitism in Sarcelles, traditionally the other paris suburb with a major Jewish population. With nine synagogues and numerous Jewish schools, Créteil has increasingly attracted practicing families.
Despite the recent events, many say the problems in Créteil are created by a minority of the overall population. “You have to see the [social] map of Créteil, there aren’t any ghettos,” said Claire, who describes herself as a “traditionalist” rather than a practicing Jew. “There is a mix everywhere and the majority of people here try to live well together.” On one of the suburb’s market places, close to the 'May 8th' synagogue, North African Arabs who have stalls on the Friday market can be seen exchanging words in Arabic with Jewish clients, for whom they stock items appropriate for different religious celebrations. “They are from a certain generation,” commented Dina’s husband, Michel, who like his wife was born in Tunisia more than 60 years ago. “We are perhaps the last generation who can speak to each other,” he added.
Arié insisted on being interviewed together with his friend Omar (whose name has also been changed on his request for the purpose of this article), a keenly practicing Muslim. “You see, that’s what Créteil is like,” said Omar. “We grew up together, we know each other. We don’t agree on everything but we respect each other.” Arié says he doesn’t want his children to develop a fear of others. “Soon, I’m going to the marriage of my mate Farid,” he added. “I know he’ll serve me a kosher meal […] Of course, you still hear people say ‘Arabs are thieves’, ‘The Jews have money’, but Omar knows the old Jews who are dying of hunger and who live thanks to charities.” Omar says he does not want Créteil’s image to be limited to the December 1st attack on the young couple in The Port neighbourhood. “They are isolated cases,” he said. “There are people whose minds are unwell. They are a small minority.”
Others are less convinced. “The youths who did that know their victims by sight,” said Steve Cohen. “They live in the same neighbourhood, and so what? That didn’t stop them.” Dina agreed. “Créteil used to be a model,” she said, emphasizing the words ‘used to be’. “Fifteen years ago, our kids rubbed shoulders at school with everyone. Everyone used to be mixed together, you didn’t even have the idea of thinking of Jews, Arabs, Blacks. That’s why what’s happening today upsets us.” She said she regrets that many young Jewish parents do not want to put their children into lay state schools, like Carole and her husband Lionel who believe a religious school is better because of its stricter discipline and because “it offers more perspective”. Sacha Reingewirtz, president of the Union of Jewish Students of France, sees isolation as a problem. “Créteil above all lacks spaces where people live together,” he said. “People know each other by sight, but don’t talk to each other.”
Disillusion in France and the pull of Israel
Esther (last name withheld) is a sparkling 80-something and says she no longer recognises French society. “I love France and I’m leaving it,” she half-joked, in a play on a phrase used by former president Nicolas Sarkozy who addressed immigrants or those of immigrant origin with the choice ‘to like or leave France’. Esther says she now wants to end her days in Israel. She complains that there are too many foreigners in France, too many young people incapable of integrating into society. “It’s now 56 years that I’ve lived here,” she said. “I assimilated myself. I like the French language. Today, these youngsters, do you know in what language they’re speaking?”
Many of the people who spoke to Mediapart designate those now spreading anti-Semitism as being a disenfranchised youth population. “The problem is the satellite dishes,” claimed Lionel, a sales manager in his forties. “In the housing estates there are uneducated youngsters who are ready to swallow anything.” Lionel has lived in various parts of the east Paris suburbs before settling in Créteil, and he says that a certain form of anti-Semitism, more or less latent, has always existed.
"France, it’s going to be more and more serious," commented a man in his sixties at the public gathering organised by the Representative Council of Jewish Organisations (CRIF) on December 7th, following the attack on the young couple in The Port neighbourhood, "You’ll see, in 15 years when there will be half the number of Jews left and twice as many Muslims," he continued. "You’ll see if you feel happy." Addressing the meeting, beside the suburb’s wide lake and where the French interior minister and the Israeli ambassador also gave speeches, CRIF president Roger Cuckierman was characteristically blunt: “If the state does not make this national cause [against anti-Semitism] an ardent requirement of all citizens, the Jews will leave en masse, and France will fall into the hands of either the sharia or the [far-right] Front National.” For Cuckierman, as for a number of Jews in Créteil who Mediapart spoke to, the current fight against anti-Semitism is about a much wider combat against Muslim extremism. A combat in which French Jews are on the frontline but which will soon concern all the French population. Indeed, the Front National is far from the last among parties to wave the jihadist scarecrow in front of a Jewish electorate that it now actively courts.
Vanessa Rouah, the headmistress of a local Jewish school, observed that an anti-Semitic “minority plays with youngsters as if they were puppets”, but she gives short shrift to the suggestion that anti-Semitism could be a part-product of the social and economic exclusion of a section of society. “There is no need to find them a thousand excuses,” she said. "My grandfather, when he arrived in France in the 1960s, he had to start again from nothing. He had lost everything.” For most of the Jews in Créteil who Mediapart met with, the Palestinian conflict has served as a mask for what is a profound and long-entrenched anti-Semitism. “Anti-Zionism, that’s not true, it is anti-Semitism,” said Carole. “Moreover, why don’t they demonstrate over Darfour? Over what’s happening in Syria? In Niger ? Do they even know how the Arab countries treat the Palestinians?”
A number of interviewees point to the French media for fanning a fire of hate against Israel, and, by ricochet, the Jewish population in France. “This summer, images of Gaza were streamed endlessly, without any precautions,” said Vanessa Rouah. “The youngsters were fed with hate.” Créteil rabbi Alain Sénior agreed. “The role of the press, which hasn’t stopped demonizing Israel, is fundamental in what is going on today,” he commented. “As soon as things start bubbling over there, the shock waves arrive here. To show the Israeli army as executioners has consequences here.” Sénior, repeating the official line of the Israeli government, underlines that the Israeli army is “the only one that sends written notices to populations to warn them that it is going to start bombing”.
Arié, the security guard, who has lived 15 years in Israel, says he doesn’t recognise the country in the way it is presented in the French press. “It is never said that over there things work fine with Israeli Arabs, for example,” he said.
“When I discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with my work colleagues, I can well see that they often don’t know much about it,” said Claire. “They often don’t know where to put Israel on a map and are surprised when I tell them that the country has the size of two French départements [counties].”
For headmistress Vanessa Rouah, “the problem is that this conflict has become everyone’s business in France”. She complains that she is even sometimes expected to justify the position of the Israeli government. “I’m French, aren’t I?” she adds.
In the interviews with the Jews of Créteil who Mediapart met over recent weeks, the issue of leaving France – whether willingly or not – almost always figured at some point in the conversation. “I have never made out so many certificates of Judaism for people who want to leave for Israel,” said rabbi Alain Sénior. “People of all ages, of all types.”
Some, like Stéphane Touati, who is currently unemployed, speak of no longer feeling they live in security in France and, however paradoxical it might seem, believe they would be safer in Israel, a country at war. Others talk simply of their particular attraction towards Israel. Albert Elharrar, president of the Créteil Jewish community’s representative council, says he understands Israel is attracting young Jews of Créteil, apart from those who make a move on strictly religious grounds. “It is a dynamic society, with universities of a very good standard,” he said. “And to do your studies there reassures parents. It avoids mixed marriages.”
Claire admits to having sometimes thought about leaving France. “Like all the French, we’re hit by the economic situation, the morosity of the country,” she commented, placing a different perspective on such thoughts. She says she was reassured by the high-profile stand against anti-Semitism taken in December by the government and prompted by the latest horrific example in Créteil. She hopes that this might now mean the issue is at last taken seriously in France. “Créteil is my town,” she said. “It’s where I grew up. I don’t intend running away from it.”
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse.