French police a few days ago killed an armed man who had set fire to a synagogue in Rouen, northern France, before being killed by the police. Imagine if it had been full of faithful. And imagine if it had been a mosque.
The first synagogue to be burned was that of Bondy. That was in 2002. Since then, there have been almost no Jews in Bondy. But there are two golden domes on the mosque in the center of the square.
From 2000 to 2001, 20 synagogues burned in France.
The list is endless: an incendiary device against a Jewish school in Marseille; a car on fire against the gate of a synagogue in Toulouse; a Jewish educational institution devastated by fire in Gagny; the Or Aviv synagogue in Marseille destroyed by fire; a classroom at the Ozar-Hatorah college in Créteil destroyed by fire.
Samuel Sandler, head of the Jewish community of Versailles, the father of Jonathan and the grandfather of Gabriel and Arié killed in the Toulouse attack, had his city’s synagogue included in the list of national monuments: “My feeling is that the our community will have disappeared in twenty-thirty years. I don’t want our synagogue to be destroyed or, worse, used for illegitimate purposes.”
In Clichy there was a very beautiful synagogue, but it was closed after three fires. A fire is often enough to destroy a Jewish community. Like when a synagogue was burned in Trappes. It was 2000.
“The Jews have all left the city,” two Le Monde journalists, Ariane Chemin and Raphaëlle Bacqué, tell in the book “La Communauté”. “One after another, the Jewish families of Trappes left the city to settle in more welcoming ones. The butcher is gone, as is Ben Yedder, the baker. There are no Jews left in Trappes”.
A crowd gathered at the doors of the Abravanel synagogue in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. The “demonstrators” are Trotskyists, environmentalists, trade unionists and Islamists. They wave Palestinian flags and shout “death to the Jews!” and “Allahu Akbar!”.
The 200 Jews in the synagogue on Rue de la Roquette are forced to barricade themselves inside, while outside they try to break in with chairs, bars and knives. It takes three hours to disperse the crowd.
Half of the Jewish families of Villepinte, a proletarian suburb north of the capital, have left the neighborhood, and the synagogue, already burned down in 2011, no longer has any faithful.
Many synagogues burned in the rest of Europe.
In recent days, a synagogue in Warsaw was set on fire.
Before that, an Arab threw three Molotov cocktails at the synagogue in Wuppertal, western Germany, the same one burned by the Nazis during Kristallnacht, the pogrom of November 1938.
Molotov cocktails exploded at a synagogue in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Molotov cocktails bombed a synagogue in Anderlecht, Belgium, in a working-class area with a large population of Arab immigrants.
Omar El-Hussein, a Dane of Palestinian Arab origin, opened fire outside a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing a guard and a Jew, and wounding two policemen.
“I’m in pieces,” the famous singer Enrico Macias reacted this morning to the news of the Rouen synagogue being set on fire. Born to a Jewish family in Constantine, in what was then French Algeria, Macias said: “I was born in 1938, it was already the beginning of the world war, then there was the Algerian war. And now, at the end of my days, I see France torn apart by this anti-Semitism that breaks my heart.”
On August 5, 1934, 28 Jews were murdered by Muslims in their neighborhood in Constantina, chased into their homes, men, women and children slaughtered at knifepoint. This memory will be very present in the minds of the older people at the time of the “events” in Algeria, thirty years later.
On June 22, 1961, the popular Jewish composer of Arab-Andalusian music, Raymond Leyris, was killed by Algerian nationalists in the Constantine market. The killing of the musician was the starting signal for the Jews. All 100,000 Jews leave Algeria after the murder of the musician Leyris. On the day of Leyris’ funeral, the entire community paid homage to him.
Will they see each other again tomorrow, they wondered. No, they’ll all go away. The Jewish cemetery overlooking Constantina is today the last trace of the Jewish presence.
Only those who know nothing about Europe can remain indifferent.
In Warsaw, once the home of 350,000 Jews and the most important Jewish center in Europe, only one pre-war synagogue remains. Of the 80 synagogues in use before Nazi rule over Vienna, the Stadttempel is the only one remaining.
History now repeats itself.
In Europe, synagogues burn (again) | Israel National News – Arutz Sheva