French politics affect march to honor Jewish murder victim

France’s far-right National Front and far-left France Unbowed movement said they would take part in a march on Wednesday to honor a Holocaust survivor killed in a suspected anti-Semitic attack, despite calls by a Jewish group for them not to attend.

Mireille Knoll, 85, was found dead with 11 stab wounds at her apartment in a working-class district of Paris on Friday.

The apartment was set ablaze after the attack and her body badly burned. Police suspect that part of the motive for the killing was because Knoll was Jewish.

A march to honor her will take place in Paris later on Wednesday, organized by Crif, an umbrella organizations of French Jewish groups. Crif’s leader told far-right and far-left groups not to attend.

“Anti-Semites are over-represented in the far-left and the far-right, making those parties ones that you don’t want to be associated with,” Crif director Francis Kalifat told RTL radio.

His comments underscore the enduring tension and alarm among France’s 400,000-strong Jewish community over anti-Semitism, which Interior Minister Gerard Collomb on Tuesday described as a cancer that must not be allowed to eat away at the nation.

Other rallies in honor of Knoll, who narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz during World War II when 13,000 Jews were rounded up in July 1942 at the Vel d’Hiv velodrome in Paris, are planned in Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg.