By Hajer Mtiri
PARIS
Following the killing of a Danish Jew in last week’s gun attack outside a Copenhagen synagogue, just a month after the Paris terror attacks on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on European Jews to emigrate to Israel.
His plea seems to have resonated differently within France’s Jewish community.
For French political leaders "the home of all French Jews is France" as Prime Minister Manuel Valls has said. President Francois Hollande also reiterated that "French Jews are French and France is their natural home."
This is an opinion shared by the co-president of the French Jewish Union for Peace, Pierre Stambul.
"We are French," Stambul tells The Anadolu Agency. "Certainly there have been racism problems in France, but not just against Jews; it also targeted Arabs, Muslims and blacks as well, but we have to fight it together, not leave."
For Stambul, Netanyahu's message is a "double disgrace."
"A head of state who has committed war crimes in Gaza has not the right to say to Jews ‘your country is Israel’," Stambul adds.
For president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, Roger Cukierman, Netanyahu performed "his role" by asking Jews to emigrate to Israel like "his predecessors (who) have done the same."
However, Cukierman says that emigrating is "a very personal decision" and adds that the statements from Valls and Hollande should have "no influence in making our decision."
The number of Jews emigrating from France to Israel reached 7,000 persons in 2014, according to Jewish Agency statistics.
More Jews leave for Israel from France than from any other country except the United States.
In Paris’ 17th arrondissement, a seven-minute walk from the chic Avenue des Champs-Elysees, security remains an important issue for the French government to tackle according to members of the French Jewish community.
For the owner of a kosher grocery store in the neighborhood – who did not want to give her name – "after all these events, we all want to leave and we certainly don't feel safe."
Seeming indecisive, she initially dismissed the idea of emigration saying: "Leaving becomes less obvious, having grown up here in France."
"Some of the people who went to live in Israel are back in France, due to the differences of lifestyles between France and Israel," she says.
However, on reflection, she concludes: "I can see me doing very well there [Israel]. If I have to go, I'll go."
Her neighbor, also a French Jew, is responsible for a glassware shop and blames the French government for keeping silent.
"Repeated violent acts against Jews were considered in the 1980s to be isolated incidents," she says.
"French governments turned a blind eye on 'small' anti-Semitic attacks for years, now when it got bigger, they found themselves forced to open their eyes."
Yet, she said that she is not thinking of emigrating to Israel "at least for the time being."
