French olim mourn for a country they once loved NATHAN JEFFAY

BUSY EXPLORING a new culture and making new friends, Anna Davit is a typical gap-year student. Apart from one thing: she doesn’t want to return home.

In Jerusalem this week, the 19-yearold Parisian spent an afternoon at the funeral of four Jews killed close to her parents’ home last Friday. As she made her way out of the cemetery, she said: “Before this happened, I was thinking about going back to Paris. Now, I will probably stay here.”

Manyof the4,000peoplewhoattended Tuesday’s joint funeral were mourning for more than the four victims of the Paris kosher supermarket attack — they were mourning for a France that they once felt comfortable in.

“The France of today isn’t the France we grew up with,” said Michelle Hasson, 63, who made the move to Israel eight years ago, citing a growth in extremism and in the acceptability of antisemitism.

She has reached the painful conclusion that Jews will never be fully accepted in France. They will “never be French — they will always be Jews,” she said, adding flatly that they have “no future” in France.

In the aftermath of the attack, Israel is bracing itself for an influx of French Jews.

Immigration began to spiral after a gunmen killed four people in a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. The next year, French immigration almost doubled to 3,200. As ethnic and economic factors combined, immigration grew to 7,000 last year and officials now expect 15,000 in 2015.

According to Dov Maimon, one of the leading experts on the French Jewish community, of France’s 600,000 Jews, half will emigrate in the next 15 years (many, but not all, to Israel).

The third of the community that has the strongest Jewish identity is already severing itself from the country psychologically, he noted. “They believe that their kids will not grow up in France — this is clear to the core community.”

In Paris, some community leaders are unimpressed by all the talk of an exodus, and were offended when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advocated relocation.

They are buoyed by the solidarity fromthenon-JewishFrenchpopulation, think that people are being alarmist and note that Israel is hardly the safest country on earth.

But at the funeral, it was hard to find anyone who agreed with this kind of sentiment.