Family in France suffers antisemitic home invasion

A French Jewish community leader and his family were assaulted in their home near Paris in what representatives of French Jewry said was an antisemitic attack.

In the attack Thursday night, three men, two of whom were wearing masks, broke into the home of Roger Pinto, the president of Siona, a group that represents Sephardic Jews. The attackers beat Pinto’s son and wife in the home in the northeastern suburb of Livry Gargan, the Dreuz news website reported Sunday.

One of the attackers said: “You Jews have money,” according to family members.

The family told police the attackers were black men in their 20s or 30s who took their credit cards and jewelry, interrogated them for hours about additional items them could steal and threatened to kill them. The men ran away after Roger Pinto managed to discretely call rescue services on a mobile phone.

The Pintos were taken to hospital for treatment. They suffered some minor injuries and were deeply traumatized, the report said.

The incident is one of several in France in recent years in which criminals apparently singled out Jews based on the belief that they have money. It has provoked passionate condemnations from the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities and the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Antisemitism. Both groups said the incident was an antisemitic attack.

Bernard-Henri Levy, the French Jewish philosopher, agreed, writing on Twitter Sunday: “Shocked by the antisemitic attack... in Livry-Gargan. Solidarity with Roger Pinto and his family, the victims.”

Israeli Ambassador to France Aliza Bin-Noun also condemned the incident on Twitter and asserted it was an antisemitic attack.

In 2014, three men broke into the home of a Jewish family in Creteil near Paris. One of them raped a young woman there while another guarded her boyfriend, whom they took prisoner. A third took the couple’s credit card to extract cash from an ATM machine. They too allegedly said they targeted the couple because they were Jewish.

The Creteil incident occurred amid a major increase in antisemitic violence in France accompanying Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza that year. It echoed for many the traumatic murder and torture in 2006 of Ilan Halimi, a Jewish phone salesman who was abducted by a gang led by a career criminal with a history of targeting mostly Jewish victims.

Some French Jews regard Halimi’s murder as the turning point in the emergence of a wave of violence against Jews in France and Belgium, in which more than 12 people have died since 2012 in at least three jihadist attacks on Jewish targets. (JTA)