Europe’s other migrants

Jews in France are leading a new exodus, writes Paul Keenan

When one speaks of ‘mass migration’ in Europe, it is a near certainty that the term prompts visions of desperate Syrians moving into the continent via its open southern shores. Yet, today, there is another dramatic wave of migration taking place, less noted, but certainly of equal note, given Europe’s troubled history with the population involved.

This second migration involves Jews, who are fleeing Europe en masse.

Faced with an apparently ever-increasing incidence of anti-semitic attacks across the continent, members of Jewish communities which have endured the worst excesses of the 20th Century have concluded that their future is no longer guaranteed in Europe.

This past year, for example, Israeli officials recorded an increase in inward migration of 13% over the previous year, with Jewish members of various European countries making up the surge; Britain saw 690 depart in 2015 compared to 612 the year before, Italy 400 against 300. (These figures obviously do not include cohorts who decide to migrate to Canada or the US rather than Israel.)

Source

By far the greatest source country for migrating Jews, however, is France, from where no fewer than 8,000 Jewish citizens decided to migrate in 2015; hardly surprising, one might think, following the targeting of Jewish shoppers in the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris in which four were murdered (an event to be added to by subsequent ‘lower profile’ attacks which, totaling 508 between January and May of 2015 represented an 84% increase over 2014 – source: http://www.pjtn.org/).

January of 2015 is a useful starting point for the current surge in Jewish migration from France, though as the figures show, not the start of the phenomenon by any means. However, the Hyper Cacher attack – and the later shooting of a Jewish man at Denmark’s main synagogue in Copenhagen – saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu call on Jews to undertake Aliyah, the Hebrew term for migration to their spiritual homeland.

At that time, however, Jewish leaders across the European continent and beyond were quick to criticise Mr Netanyahu’s call, describing it as a message playing to the very extremists who would welcome a Jew-free Europe.

Most vocal at the time was Abe Foxman of America’s Anti-Defamation League. A Holocaust survivor to boot, Mr Foxman’s words struck a chord when he said: “I think what [Mr Netanyahu] should be saying is our arms are open to you whenever you want to come… I don’t think he should urge them. No, I don’t think we should so easily grant Hitler a posthumous victory.”

A strong rebuke indeed, but a year later, one must wonder whose message will ultimately be heeded.

France remains the best illustration of matters, commencing in the opening days of 2016 with the discovery in a Paris suburb of the body of Alain Ghozland, a councilman and leading light of the Jewish community.

Though on the surface a violent robbery, police did not rule out anti-semitism as the root of the attack – and still have not following the arrest of two suspects – prompting a fresh wave of fear among the Jewish community.

More significant, perhaps, for the wider community, was the reaction to an attack a day earlier in the city of Marseilles (home to the third largest European Jewish community after Paris and London), when a youth set upon a Jewish man outside a synagogue, inflicting minor injuries before fleeing.

The victim’s wearing of the traditional skull-cap (kippah), prompted Zvi Ammar, president of the Marseille Israelite Consistory to call on Jews not to wear the kippah.

Ammar was quoted as saying of the call. “We are now forced to hide a little bit [but] life is more sacred than anything else.”

Ammar’s call was instantly rejected not only by France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia, who insisted, “we should not give an inch”, but by 70% of French citizens who responded to a poll on the matter, who see Jews as a significant component of France.

Among them is Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who earlier, on the subject of Aliyah, had insisted: “Without Jews, France is no longer France. It’s the oldest community. They have been French citizens since the French Revolution.”

Mr Valls words echo the message conveyed by Frans Timmermans, First Vice-President of the European Commission who in 2015 wrote to Rabbi Menachem Margolin, General Director of the European Jewish Association.

“I am convinced that a Europe where Jewish people and other minorities do not feel home will no longer be the Europe which the founding fathers of the European Union envisaged after the war,” Mr Timmermans communicated. 

“I feel very strongly about the situation of Jewish people in Europe today.”

That situation today can hardly be overstated. Building on a seam of home-grown intolerance for the Jewish ‘other’ in France has been the hatred engendered by Islamic State (the Marseille attacker pledged his allegiance to that death cult), which in its turn, has led to renewed support for far-right parties, not just in France, but all across the continent, this latter reality alone enough to chill Jewish hearts.

Sadly, what has become a sense of Jewish isolation should, in the current climate, be one of fierce solidarity with those feeling the plight of their own community in the Middle East, the Christians.

As Renzo Gattegna, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities put it in welcoming Pope Francis to the Great Synagogue of Rome on January 17: “Christians and Jews are forced to defend themselves against fierce enemies, who are violent and intolerant, who are using the name of God to spread terror and are committing the most atrocious crimes against humanity.

“Salvation for all can come only through the creation of a strong coalition, based on shared ethical principles and values such as the respect for life and the quest for peace, capable of winning this challenge by walking together, side by side, with respect for diversity, but at the same time conscious of the many values, principles and hopes that unite us.”

Tragedy

Another tragedy in all of this lies in the fact that the very term Aliyah, translating as ‘to ascend’, while meant to be an act of positive cultural and spiritual import, has become one of desperation as Europe’s Jews feel driven from the continent by intolerance on all sides.

In the words of one of Israel’s political greats, former President Shimon Peres, as he answered Prime Minister Netanyahu’s migration call of 2015: “I would like every Jew who wants to come to Israel to please come [but] don’t come to Israel because of a political position, but because you want to come and live in Israel.

“Israel must remain a land of hope and not a land of fear.”