H eadlines
Debate Continued from Page 11
synagogue in Denmark. In 2016,
Korsia admonished a commu-
nity leader from Marseille, Zvi
Amar, for suggesting amid a
spate of anti-Semitic stabbings
that Jews avoid wearing
yarmulkes in public.

“We will not cede an inch,
we will continue to wear the
kippah,” Korsia said.

Roger Cukierman, who at
the time was the president of
the CRIF umbrella of French
Jewish communities, warned
against voicing positions like
the one put forth by Amar, as
they “translate into a defeatist
attitude of resignation.”
Such assertions have previ-
ously earned little public
rebuke, even as France endured
a series of jihadist attacks over
the past decade, including
several that have targeted Jews.

In 2012, four Jews were killed at
a Jewish school in Toulouse. In
2015, four more were killed at
a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Despite vows by the govern-
ment to stop the violence,
each year dozens of anti-
Semitic assaults occur in
France, including cases of rape,
murder and even torture.

Particularly painful to French
Jews are the cases in which they
believe the judiciary has failed
to deliver justice. In one such
case from 2017, a Muslim man
pummeled his Jewish neighbor,
Sarah Halimi, to death for 30
minutes at her home and then
threw her body out a window
while shouting about Allah and
killing “the demon.” A court
deemed him not accountable for
his actions because he was high
on marijuana at the time.

Anti-Jewish violence in
France has pushed immigra-
tion to Israel to new heights. At
least 33,278 French Jews have
immigrated there since 2013,
more than double the 15,401
French citizens who made
that move in the prior seven
years. Tens of thousands more
have moved internally, from
dangerous neighborhoods to
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM The trademark optimism of Haim Korsia, the chief rabbi of France, is coming under fire for the first time in the
Jewish community.
Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images via JTA.org
safer, heavily Jewish areas.

Kandel’s op-ed has brought
the question of what this all
means for the future of French
Jews into the open, and found
support from some of Korsia’s
prominent constituents, who
are loath to fault Jews who
choose to emigrate. Rabbi
Mikael Journo, the secre-
tary general of Korsia’s own
Association of French Rabbis,
admonished Korsia in a Jan. 29
op-ed for insensitivity to Jews
who leave France out of fear.

“We have the responsibility
as religious leaders not to fault
those who decide to leave and
to support them no matter
their reasons,” Journo wrote.

“Who are we to judge those
who want to be able to wear a
kippah on the street?”
Veronique Chemla, a
French-Jewish journalist and
blogger, said that she’s never
seen a rabbi oppose the chief
rabbi publicly in this manner.

“I think we’re seeing two
things here: the accumulated
effect of 20 years of anti-Semitic
violence, mainly by Muslims,
against French Jews, which is
of course making many French
Jews doubt their future, and
growing distrust of communal
leaders who are largely
insulated in their daily lives
from this violence,” she said.

“Increasingly, they’re seen as out
of touch and representing the
government to the Jews rather
than the other way around.”
The debate was a rare public
reflection of growing tension
between French Jews, many of
them living in rough areas with
frequent anti-Semitic incidents,
and communal leaders who
tend to live in more upscale
areas. Nowhere is this gap more
noticeable than in the creeping
rehabilitation of far-right ideol-
ogies among the rank-and-file
of French Jewry.

Despite the public rebuke
of communal leaders, support
for Jewish defense groups in
France is on the rise. Polls also
suggest that Jewish support
for the far-right National
Rally party of Marine Le Pen
moved from being nonexis-
tent 20 years ago to just a
few points below the national
average. Rabbi Dov Maimon, head
of the Europe activity of the
Jerusalem-based Jewish People
Policy Institute, wrote on
Facebook that Korsia’s propo-
sition is “to love Israel but from
a distance, literally alienated
from it. He has fallen in love
with his galut [exile].”
But Paul Levy, a regional
leader in the Consistoire, the
organization responsible for
religious Jewish life in France
that employs Korsia, said
Journo’s op-ed “divides us
French Jews when a rabbi’s job
is to unite.” l
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