BONJOUR & SHALOM TO THE APPLE T

With a wave of attacks targeting French Jews, hundreds are fleeing home for NYC

HE City of Light is losing its Stars of David.

As a rash of anti-Semitic attacks, largely at the hands of Muslim extremists, has hit France, many Jews are fleeing.

“In the last couple of years, [there have] been hundreds [of French Jews] moving to New York City,” said Steve Eisenberg, co-founder of the Jewish International Connection of New York, a Manhattan group that helps international Jews acclimate to the city. “They’re here because they just can’t breathe as Jews in France. There’s no Jewish future there. You can’t walk in Paris wearing a yarmulke. You’re taking your life in your hands.”

In January, an 8year-old outside his Jewish day school in Sarcelles was beaten to the ground, and a 15-year-old girl wearing a Jewish school uniform was slashed across the face by an unknown man.

On Jan. 9, fire roared through two kosher Paris markets, weeks after swastikas were painted on both stores. Although authorities suspect the fires were arson, the date is significant: It was the third anniversary of the Hyper Cacher supermarket massacre in Paris, in which gunman Amedy Coulibaly murdered four Jewish cus- tomers during a hostage situation. Before he was killed by police, Coulibaly demanded that Saïd and Chérif Kouachi — brothers who had committed a murderous assault on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper days earlier — not be harmed when found. (The same day, the siblings were killed during a police raid.)

Last year, two yarmulke-wearing Jewish brothers were attacked in a Paris suburb by thugs wielding a hacksaw, and 65-year-old Orthodox physician Sarah Halimi was found dead outside her apartment. Neighbors reported hearing the accused murderer, a Muslim from Mali, yell, “Allahu akbar,” before he allegedly pushed her out a window. After President Emmanuel Macron called for an investigation, the case was classified as an antiJewish hate crime.

Julia Buchwald, a Parisian émigré now living on the Upper East Side, has grandparents who survived the Holocaust by moving from Poland to France and hiding in the north. “They moved to France, not knowing what would happen in France,” she said. “[Now] it’s the same situation as my grandparents.”

During World War II, much of France’s Jewish contingent escaped the horrors of concentration camps — though about 72,500 perished.

Today the country has the third- largest Jewish population, after Israel and the US, with around 500,000 people. Many of them are the descendents of refugees displaced from North African nations such as Algeria and Morocco, who fled in the 1960s after those countries won independence from France and tensions heated.

Eighteen years ago, however, the Jewish population in France was around 555,000. “Since 2000, the number of Jews leaving France out of fear for their safety . . . has increased drastically,” said Ari Afilalo, a Paris native who is now the president of the West Side Sephardic Synagogue in Manhattan. (American and French migration officials do not keep statistics on the number of Jews moving from France to the US.)

“It’s a climate of fear,” said Robert Ejnes, executive director of Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, a Jewish communal organization in Paris.

Over the past decade in France, anti-Semitic hate crimes have reportedly averaged roughly 566 a year. The highest yearly total, 851 incidents, came in 2014, according to Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, director of Jewish advocacy organization AJC Europe.

“Although Jews represent less than 1 percent of the French population, 40 percent of all violent hate crimes in France are anti-Semitic,” she said.

President Macron, following the attack on the 8-year-old boy, tweeted on Jan. 31 that “the whole country . . . must rise up today alongside French Jews to fight with them against these disgusting attacks.”

Here, three Jewish people who left France for New York tell The Post their stories.

You Y can’t walk in Paris wearing a yarmulke. You’re taking your life in your hands. — Steve Eisenbergg of the Jewish International Connection of New York