Savage murder of an elderly Holocaust survivor in France part of a growing wave of antisemitism
THE name Vel’ d’Hiv occupies a particular – and troubling – place in the French imagination. Over two days in July 1942, French police officers arrested more than 13,000 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, on behalf of the Nazis and held them in a Parisian arena known as Vel’ d’Hiv before they were deported to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Fewer than 100 returned.
The ghosts of Vel’ d’Hiv still stir soul-searching which sometimes tips into national debate, such as last year.
Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen sparked controversy when she argued that France was not culpable. In 1995, the then president Jacques Chirac admitted the responsibility of the French state and apologised.
Mireille Knoll narrowly escaped the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up when she fled the French capital at the age of nine. Last week, the octogenarian Holocaust survivor was stabbed multiple times and then set on fire in her Paris apartment in what police believe was an antisemitic attack. Two men have been arrested. Ms Knoll was the 11th French Jew to die in an antisemitic attack in the past 12 years. Her killing echoes that last year of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi, who was beaten and thrown out the window of her Paris home. A judge last month classified the killing as driven by antisemitism.
Ms Knoll’s murder comes amid growing disquiet within France’s 550,000-strong Jewish population – the largest in Western Europe – about increasing antisemitism and how often it is manifested in violence. Daily violence against Jews rose by 26pc in 2017 compared with the year before, according to French Interior Ministry figures, with criminal damage to Jewish places of worship and cemeteries up by 22pc.
French Jews have been emigrating to Israel in unprecedented numbers in recent years, with a spike of 7,900 in the wake of an attack on a Parisian kosher supermarket two days after the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’ was targeted by jihadists.
Ms Knoll’s killing prompted demonstrations in Paris this week and calls for a stronger reaction to what many see as new manifestations of the older scourge of antisemitism. Some are rooted in more radical interpretations of Islam adhered to by a minority of France’s Muslim population, Europe’s largest.
Sharon Nazarian, director of international affairs at the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, has argued that contemporary antisemitism in France is “so pernicious” because it is emanating from several quarters. “From the right in the form of classical antisemitism, from the left in the guise of criticism of Israel, and from Islamic extremists who too often target Jews,” she wrote recently.
Speaking to CRIF, an umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, earlier this month, France’s President Emmanuel Macron told of new plans to fight racism and antisemitism. “We have understood, with horror, that antisemitism is still alive,” he said, “and on this issue our response must be unforgiving.”
THE growing anxieties of France’s Jewish community come at a time when antisemitism is on the rise in several parts of Europe, very often enabled by the increasing popularity of populist right-wing parties whose messaging is regularly couched in antisemitic language and tropes.
In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party has been accused of trying to rewrite the history of the Holocaust by passing controversial legislation that would punish anyone who discusses Polish complicity.
The debate over the law has revealed a disturbing seam of antisemitism in the country. This – and the emergence of similar dynamics elsewhere in Europe – is a cause for concern for the likes of Polish Holocaust survivor and activist Marian Turski who told me when I visited Warsaw earlier this month that he feared the lessons of history had not been learned.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been accused of using antisemitic tropes, particularly in his government’s campaign against George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist. And in the UK this week, media headlines referred to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s “antisemitism problem” following accusations that he has not done enough to tackle such sentiment within his party’s ranks.
The criticism, which is not the first time Corbyn has faced such charges, followed a report which shows Labour has a backlog of over 70 complaints of antisemitism yet to be addressed. London mayor Sadiq Khan has said he is “heartbroken” that “Londoners of Jewish faith don’t feel the Labour Party is for them”.
The challenge of these new iterations of antisemitism is not just limited to Europe, a continent where the centuries-old prejudice led to the horror of the Holocaust. The emboldening of white nationalists in Trump’s America has been accompanied by an increasingly public antisemitism on social media and at rallies like the one last year in Charlotteville, Virginia, where a counterprotester was killed.