The future of Jews in France became a big issue in Israel’s election campaign after the attack in January on a kosher grocery store in Paris.
Israeli leaders urged French Jews to emigrate there, or ‘make aliyah’; France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community estimated to be between 500,000 and 600,000 people. In Strasbourg, like in other parts of France, security has been stepped up outside Jewish sites.
“After the attacks and Copenhagen, unfortunately we saw a Jewish cemetery vandalised where more than 300 tombs were defaced. Somehow the community here feels that we are saying to them that we have neither a past nor a future,” said Maurice Dahan, an honorary vice-president of the Lower Rhine Jewish Consistory, the name of the local Jewish affairs body in Alsace.
Nearly seven thousand French Jews quit France for Israel last year. But as a leading figure of Strasbourg’s Jewish community explains, many wanted a change in lifestyle.
“Nearly of them already had the idea in
