The Berith Chalom synagogue (photo above) has been targeted with threats of attacks. On Saturday September 30, the officials of the place of worship in the 9th arrondissement of Paris received a disturbing voice message on their answering machine, as reported by Le Parisien. ” By the Quran of Mecca, I will come to your synagogue with an explosive belt and blow everything up,” they were told.
The explicit threats were accompanied by references to Palestine, but also to Samuel Paty, the history teacher at a school in Val-d’Oise who had been beheaded by a radicalised Islamist in 2020. Although the site was not cleared after receiving this disturbing message, the president of the synagogue filed a complaint with the arrondissement commissariat on Tuesday October 3. The police officers tried to identify the perpetrator of the threats by asking his telephone provider for assistance. Thanks to this cooperation, the officers were able to identify the location of the threatened person in Marseille.
As a result, the Paris prosecutor’s office launched investigations into ” death threats aggravated by the fact that they were committed on the basis of religion ” and ” threats of dangerous bodily harm “. ” The mayor of the 9th arrondissement reiterated that no stone should be left unturned while assuring that ” all means will be used to protect places of worship “.
According to the president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Crif), other synagogues have also been affected by threats of attacks in recent weeks. “These threats are made against the backdrop of Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah,” he stressed, adding that this climate of terror was “symptomatic of recent anti-Semitism”.