On Tuesday, two people were charged with the brutal murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old French Jewish woman, who was repeatedly stabbed and whose body was then set alight in a crime being treated as anti-Semitic by French police.
Knoll, who managed to flee a mass roundup of Jews in Paris during World War II, was found dead Friday in her apartment in the east of the French capital, where she lived alone.
This violent murder which has echoes of a similar case from April 2017 in which Sarah Halimi was also killed in her own home in the same 11th arrondissement of Paris.
The murder of Knoll and Halimi has once again rocked France's Jewish community, which was the victim of terror attacks in 2012 and 2015.
“People are extremely shocked and very worried,” Marc Knobel, head of studies at France's Jewish umbrella organization CRIF told The Local.
“There have been 11 anti-Semitic murders since 2000 and added to that there is all the everyday violence that the Jewish community goes through.”
Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll Photos: Screenshot/Jewish Community Twitter account and AFP
In recent months that “everyday violence” has seen arson attacks on Jewish stories and Jewish families attacked in their homes.
“I think people are more worried than angry because where can you direct you anger?” said Knobel.
Knobel went on to say that the difficulty of the recent murders of Knoll and Halimi is that they took place in their own homes, behind closed doors, where they should have been safe.
“You can't protect everyone or put a policeman behind every door,” he said, adding that it used to be more common for anti-Semitic attacks to take place against young boys on their way to school or against people going to the Synagogue, that is to say “out in the open”.
“Now it's old ladies being killed in situations that are terrible which has resulted in a great feeling of fear and insecurity in the community,” he said.
Knobel added that “nobody in the Jewish community doubts the sincerity” of President Emmanuel Macron when he condemned anti-Semitic violence as the “shame of France”in a recent address to CRIF.
“But there is no miracle solution to the situation,” he said, adding that it's necessary to make sure schools are addressing the issue properly and that action is taken regarding the spread of anti-Semitic and racist ideas on the internet, which he described as the “world's bin”.
“However, let's not forget that we're not living in a Russian pogrom — many Jewish people live good lives in France,” he said.
After the murder of Knoll, Jewish organisations in France and prominent members of the community took to social media to express their shock at the horrific crime.
The Grand Rabbi of France wrote on Twitter: “Horrified by the tragic loss of Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, almost a year to the day after the murder of Sarah Halimi-Attal. The horror of crime and the violence of the murderers are identical and remind us of the negative side of humanity.”
Horrifié par la tragique disparition de Mireille Knoll, rescapée de la Shoah, presque un an jour pour jour après le meurtre de Sarah Halimi-Attal.
L'horreur du crime et la violence des bourreaux sont identiques et renvoient à la négation du visage humain…— Haïm Korsia (@HaimKorsia) March 26, 2018
Parisian rabbi Gabriel Farhi also took to Twitter, writing: “Less than a year after the assassination of #SarahHalimi, the foul beast is back. Anger joins with tears.”
And President of CRIF, Francis Kalifat also expressed his anger.
#News #Antisemitism – Relief after the restraint of the anti-Semitic character of the murder of #MireilleKnoll but angry and worried about such barbarity in France, in 2018
— Francis Kalifat (@FrancisKalifat) March 26, 2018
A vigil will be held in memory of Mireille Knoll on Wednesday at 6.30 pm at Place de la Nation in Paris.
Anti-Semitic violence
The most recent figures available show that anti-Semitic violence increased by 26 percent last year in France and that criminal damage to Jewish places of worship and burials increased by 22 percent.
In January an eight-year-old boy wearing the Jewish skullcap was beaten up by two teenagers in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles in what prosecutors said appeared to be attack motivated by the child's religion.
A record 7,900 French Jews emigrated to Israel in 2015 following the deadly jihadist shooting at a Parisian kosher supermarket two days after the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
That exodus has since slowed, but a spate of anti-Semitic attacks since have continued to frighten one of Europe's biggest Jewish communities, numbering an estimated half a million.
