H EADLINES
French Chief Rabbi Clashes with Fellow Communal
Leaders in Debate Over Nation’s Jewish Future
WORLD CNAAN LIPHSHIZ | JTA.ORG
FRENCH CHIEF Rabbi Haim
Korsia has long argued that
his community is inseparable
from the wider French society,
which he insists will overcome
its many challenges, including
the anti-Semitism that has
driven thousands of French
Jews to seek a more secure
existence in Israel.

But this hopeful message,
a Korsia trademark, is for the
fi rst time coming under fi re
from prominent French Jews
who accuse the chief rabbi of
failing to recognize a bitter
reality and unfairly faulting
those who choose to leave.

In op-eds and social media
posts in recent weeks, French-
speaking Jews in France and
Israel have pushed back against
Korsia’s optimistic take and
his assertion that fear should
not be the basis for emigra-
tion by French Jews. Th e debate,
set off by a controversial and
deeply pessimistic op-ed in the
mainstream community weekly
Actualité Juive, has dragged
into the open a conversation
about the fate of French Jewish
life that more commonly takes
place behind closed doors.

“It may actually be time to
say aloud what many think
inside: France is overrun,”
wrote the op-ed’s author, Ariel
Kandel, the Jerusalem-based
director of an organization
promoting French immigra-
tion to Israel and the former
head of the Jewish Agency’s
France operations.

“It’s overrun in the fi ght on
COVID-19, in the distribution
of vaccines, but also in the
fi ght against radical Islam and
anti-Semitism,” wrote Kandel,
who is well-known in the
community. Kandel cited the common
concerns of Jews in France
for their security, recalling
being harassed for wearing
a yarmulke as a teenager on
the Paris subway. But he went
further in suggesting that
French-Jewish patriotism
amounts to little more than
cheap symbolism.

“Jews live in France for
practical reasons. Th ey love
French culture, but their
support for France is mostly
on the pitch at soccer matches,”
Kandel wrote. “It’s no coinci-
dence that so many children
of our community leaders live
in Israel.”
Despite years in which
French Jews have been the target
of terrorist attacks and hundreds
of violent assaults, Jewish leader-
ship and notable fi gures have
rarely voiced hopelessness about
the future. Korsia has taken the
lead in combating perceived
defeatism. He called Kandel’s piece
“biased, bitter and one that
caricaturizes a whole society.”
Noting the French Jews who had
died fi ghting for France in the
20th century, Korsia, a former
military chaplain and self-
described French patriot, wrote
in Actualité Juive that they “died
because they were French, not
because they were Jews!”
Korsia has consistently
argued positions to this eff ect,
insisting that French Jews
assert their rightful place in
French society and immigrate
to Israel only as “an ideolog-
ical and spiritual choice,” not
because of fear for their safety.

In 2015, he pushed back
forcefully aft er Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
told European Jews to come
“home” to Israel following a
deadly terrorist attack on a
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