Marseille anti-Semitic attack sparks debate on wearing skullcaps

Marseille's top Jewish leader has called on Jewish men and boys to stop wearing kippa "until better days"

MARSEILLE: The latest in a string of anti-Semitic attacks in Marseille sparked a debate on Tuesday on whether Jewish men and boys should stop wearing skullcaps to avoid being targeted.

"Unfortunately for us, we are targeted," Marseille's top Jewish leader Zvi Ammar told AFP. "As soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death," he said, calling on Jewish men and boys to stop wearing the kippa "until better days".

But France's chief rabbi Haim Korsia rejected the call, telling AFP: "We should not give an inch, we should continue wearing the kippa." Roger Cukierman, the head of France's umbrella grouping of Jewish organisations, CRIF, agreed, saying the call reflected "a defeatist attitude".

Ammar's urging came the day after an attack in broad daylight on a Jewish teacher who was wearing a skullcap and carrying a Torah. "We have to hide ourselves a little bit," he said, adding that making such an appeal made him "sick to the stomach".

Monday's attack by a 15-year-old Turkish Kurd was the third on Jews in recent months in Marseille, which counts some 70,000 Jews in a population of 855,000, making it the second largest Jewish population in France after Paris.

The assailant, who investigators believe was self-radicalised via the Internet, claimed he was acting in the name of the Islamic State group. He slashed 35-year-old Benjamin Ansellem in the shoulder and hand in a scuffle that saw the victim, who fell to the ground, using his Torah as a shield to try to fend off the attack.

Ansellem's wife Mazal said he had already decided not to wear a skullcap "and encourages the community to do the same, not because he is afraid or ashamed to be Jewish, quite the contrary, but for security." The attack followed assaults on three Jews in October, one with a knife near a synagogue by a drunken assailant.

In November, another Jewish teacher was stabbed by people shouting anti-Semitic obscenities and support for the Islamic State group.

France's Jewish community has grown used to living under the surveillance of armed soldiers around synagogues and schools since being targeted in a militant attack in Paris last January. This weekend, France marked a year since the attacks that left 17 people dead, including four gunned down in a Jewish supermarket.

According to French government statistics, anti-Semitic acts have soared in recent years, with the number reported between January 2015 and May 2015 increasing 84 per cent compared with the same period in 2014.

Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said that since November's extremist rampage in Paris that claimed 130 lives, his city had opened 70 investigations into attacks, threats and incitements to hatred, as well as the offence of "defending terrorism".

The frequency of such offences was "much greater than elsewhere" in France, he said. At the same time there has been an increase in emigration from France to Israel, with record departures in 2015 of 7,900 people.