JNS
The incident coincides with an explosion of antisemitic crimes that Jewish leaders say is fueled by hateful rhetoric against Israel.
A Jewish boy said he was assaulted in front of a synagogue in Lyon, France, on Friday.
The incident, which prompted vocal condemnations by the city’s mayor, occurred amid a wave of antisemitic incidents in France, one that has featured prominently in that country’s diplomatic tensions with Israel over the war against Hamas in Gaza.
Prosecutors opened an investigation into an alleged antisemitic assault on the 14-year-old boy outside a synagogue in Lyon, the Libération newspaper reported.
According to the boy’s father, the teenager was walking home alone on Friday when a man in his 20s approached him and asked if he smoked. The boy replied that he didn’t, and the man allegedly hurled antisemitic insults at him before kicking him in the hip. The victim suffered injuries requiring two days of medical leave, according to Liberation.
Lyon Prosecutor Thierry Dran confirmed that police have been tasked with investigating the incident as “aggravated violence against a minor due to religious affiliation.” No arrests have been made.
Lyon Mayor Grégory Doucet condemned the synagogue assault, saying he was “deeply shocked” by the violence. “As mayor and as a citizen, I condemn with the greatest firmness these antisemitic acts. I want their perpetrators to be identified and punished with the full force of the law,” he said.
Doucet also said the city would plant a tree in memory of Ilan Halimi, a French-Jewish man who was murdered in 2006 by criminals who abducted him for a ransom because he was Jewish.
Doucet belongs to The Ecologists party, a far-left movement that has publicly endorsed a blanket boycott of Israel, calls for an immediate recognition by France of Palestinian statehood, and has called its war on Hamas a “genocide.”
French Jewish groups have consistently criticized such rhetoric, as well as the French government’s plan to recognize a Palestinian state next month, as adding fuel to the fires of antisemitic violence in France.
Last week, the president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, Yonathan Arfi, reiterated this message in a statement, writing: “CRIF recalls its rejection of the plan to recognize Palestinian statehood by France and its concern over how this plan is galvanizing the agitators of LFI and other preachers of the antisemitic hatred that surrounds us.”
LFI (La France Insoumise, or "France Unbowed") is a large far-left anti-Israel political party.
Statehood and antisemitism
Arfi's statement follows a diplomatic row involving Israel, the United States and France over Paris’s plan to recognize a Palestinian state next month along with the United Kingdom, Malta, Canada and Australia.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron last week, in which he accused Macron of contributing to antisemitism by calling for international recognition of a Palestinian state.
Macron answered Netanyahu on Monday, implicitly accusing him of “weaponizing antisemitism” for political purposes. Macron insisted that France was making significant efforts to curb antisemitism but that Israel’s actions in Gaza and Judea and Samaria “give a pretext for antisemitism and will endanger Jewish communities worldwide.”
Also on Monday, U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Kushner published an open letter to Macron in which he expressed “deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it.” The letter went on to say that “not a day passes without Jews assaulted in the street, synagogues or schools defaced, or Jewish-owned businesses vandalized.”
Last year saw the most antisemitic physical assaults in France in more than a decade, with 106 reported cases documented by the SPCJ (Service de protection de la communauté juive). Most antisemitic incidents in France are perpetrated by Muslims or people from Muslim-majority countries or backgrounds, according to the BNVCA (Bureau national de vigilance contre l’antisémitisme).
The total number of antisemitic acts recorded last year—1,570—has slightly decreased from the 1,676 reported the previous year, but the 2024 tally is still one of the highest on record. In the years 2012-2022, France saw an average of 540 antisemitic incidents annually.
