By Canaan Lidor, JNS
France’s newly announced security measures have yet to restore confidence in authorities’ ability to contain rioting, a leader of the French Jewish community told JNS on Tuesday.
“This week will be a very important week in order to know if the state takes back the power or not,” said Robert Ejnes, executive director of CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France), the umbrella organization representing French-Jewish institutions.
Asked whether he had confidence that authorities would be able to restore order in the face of the mass rioting, he said: “Not yet. We need to wait.”
Bruno Benjamin, the head of the CRIF branch of Marseille-Provence this week urged French President Emmanuel Macron to declare a national state of emergency.
On Monday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced “partial” and “localized” curfews following the weekend’s riots, in which at least 150 police officers were injured, according to Le Monde.
The riots, which began last month ostensibly over poor conditions in French schools, have descended into violence against police, arson and vandalism, as well as widespread looting. Palestinian flags, in addition to Moroccan and Algerians ones, waved at protests have highlighted the role of immigrants from Muslim countries in the rioting. Benjamin accused the far-left France Unbowed party, or LFI, of orchestrating the riots, with help from people "who live in France, but hate France."
Ejnes said that the justice system’s handling of about 1,800 people who’d been arrested during the rioting in recent days was a major test for the state’s resolve to end the escalation.
“We’re very eager to know now what will happen” to those arrested, he said, to establish “if the rule of law will prevail in France or whether these same people will be out by the next riot.”
Lecornu appeared “determined” to stop the violence, Ejnes said, but added that a partial curfew offered only a temporary response.
Ejnes also challenged claims circulating in Israel and on Jewish social media that rioters were systematically targeting Jewish businesses. Some Jewish-owned stores had suffered attacks, he said, but that alone did not establish an antisemitic motive. On Saturday night, a synagogue in the 19h Arrondissement of Paris was ransacked in an incident that Ejnes said did not feature any evidence of an antisemitic attack, and which seemed to suggest a robbery.
Ejnes commented on a report Sunday by journalist Paul Amar of the Cnews television channel about a street in Marseille where only Jewish-owned stores hed been targeted. Ejnes said that he was aware of the report, but that it was not indicative of a phenomenon in which Jews are specifically targeted. Benjamin in Marseille told JNS the information reported by Cnews was “false.”
The French-Jewish community’s security organization, SPCJ (Le Service de protection de la communauté juive), issued a statement saying it had no evidence that businesses had been attacked specifically because their owners were Jewish, Ejnes noted.
That assessment offered no guarantee against future antisemitic attacks, Ejnes added.
“We cannot be reassured that things will go well. We have to be realistic,” he said. “We have to raise the level of defense of the Jewish community, which is what we’re doing.”
