The report released Tuesday by the SPCJ, the security unit of France’s Jewish communities, showed that 614 anti-Semitic acts were documented in the republic last year compared to 389 in 2011.
"2012 has been a year of unprecedented violence against Jews in France,” according to the report, which referenced the shooting murders of a rabbi and three Jewish children on March 19 by an Islamist radical at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Incidents in which the victims were accosted physically or verbally on the street witnessed an increase of 82 percent, to 315 last year from 177 cases in 2011, SPCJ said. A fourth of the 96 physical anti-Semitic assaults involved a weapon.
The SPCJ report reflects a near doubling in physical anti-Semitic assaults, of which 57 were documented in 2011.
SPCJ notes two peaks in anti-Semitic attacks in 2012: following the Toulouse shooting, when 90 acts were recorded within 10 days, and after the October 6 bombing of a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles in which two people were lightly wounded, when 28 acts were recorded in the next eight days.
Anti-Semitism could destroy the history of French Jewry, the leader of France's Jewish communities said.
“Not long ago, the notion that resurgent anti-Semitism could endanger the presence of Jews in France would have been considered absurd,” Dr. Richard Prasquier, president of the Jewish CRIF umbrella group, said Sunday in Paris at the organization's annual national conference.
“This has changed” due to “parties and groups which are at times explicitly racist, and at other times ultra-secular [and in opposition to] ritual slaughter and circumcision," he said. "There is new anti-Semitism, and it complements the old.”
Planned as French Jewry's main event of the year, the conference was devoted to combating anti-Semitism and drew a predominantly Jewish crowd of approximately 1,000 people. CRIF's first annual event was held last year under the banner "Tomorrow, the Jews of France.”
The March 2012
murder of four Jews in Toulouse by a Muslim extremist and the explosion of anti-Semitic incidents that it triggered dictated that the emphasis this year be placed on the growing threat of anti-Semitism, Prasquier said.
At the conference, speakers showcased educational programs for combating anti-Semitism.
In the first eight months of 2012, SPCJ, the security unit of French Jewish communities, counted 386 of what it called “anti-Semitic acts,” representing a 45 percent increase compared to the corresponding period in 2011, when SPCJ counted 266 such incidents. SPCJ said the figures correlated to official data by French authorities.
France has a Jewish population of some 500,000, according to the European Jewish Congress.
French Jews attacked in two incidents
The security service of the French Jewish community reports a 45% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in France in the past year.
Two young Jews were attacked in France this week, one in Marseille and one in Toulouse, where almost a year ago an Islamist terrorist killed three soldiers and four Jews before police shot him dead.
The most traumatic incident occurred Wednesday at the entrance to the Ohr Torah school in Toulouse, the same place where Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah opened fire on March 19, 2012, on two Jewish pupils, their father and the headmaster’s daughter.
The school changed its name after the tragic events from Otzar Hatorah to Ohr Torah.
In the recent incident, a middle school pupil was leaving the school to go home, wearing a kippa, when a woman suddenly brandished a knife at him. He ran back into the building, where guards called security services.
They arrived immediately and arrested the woman, known as a mentally ill neighbor who had spent time in a psychiatric hospital. She didn’t say a word and didn’t try to explain herself, according to police and Jewish sources.
The woman was put under psychiatric watch.
The second attack took place outside Marseille’s main railway station, Gare Saint- Charles, at 3:30 p.m. on Monday.
A 20-year-old Jewish man, wearing a gold Magen David pendant, was leaving the station, which is also a large shopping mall, when two young men on a scooter approached him, tore off the chain from his neck and drove away.
A group of young men standing nearby came over and insulted the victim, using anti-Semitic language, hit him, and stole his MP3 player and 100 euros, according to the Metro newspaper.
The police opened an investigation, treating the case as an anti-Semitic attack.
Eugene Caselli, the president of the Urban Community of Marseille Provence Métropole, which has a high percentage of residents of North African origin, expressing his “profound indignation and rage at this unacceptable act of racist violence.”
There has been a 45 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in France since the Merah attack, as recorded by SPCJ, the security service of the French Jewish community.
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