French Leader Decries Attacks on Jewish Schoolchildren as Police Search for Assailant Who Targeted 13-Year-Old Boy on Way to Synagogue

 

The leader of France’s Jewish community denounced what he called the “unbearable” situation of children victimized by antisemitism, the European Jewish Press (EJP) reported.

 

Roger Cukierman expressed concern about Jewish kids “suffering physical and verbal abuse at public schools” during a radio interview on Monday, ahead of the annual dinner of CRIF, the umbrella organization for French Jewry over which he presides.

 

This is the reason, Cukierman told Europe 1, that “today, only one third of Jewish children go to the secular schools; and two thirds attend either Jewish or Christian private schools.”

 

Cukierman’s statement came on the heels of Saturday afternoon’s violent attack in Paris against a 13-year-old boy wearing a kippah, the EJP reported.

 

According to the report, the boy was walking to meet his father at synagogue, when three youths, whom he later described as of “African origin,” shouted “dirty Jew” at him before pulling off his skullcap, grabbing him by the hair and ramming his head into a pole.

 

The boy, who suffered bruises to his face, joined his father and then filed a complaint with police against his assailants, who purportedly fled the scene at the first sight of passersby.

 

In response to this incident, said EJP, the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l’Antisemitisme (the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Antisemitism or BNCVA) condemned the incident and called on law enforcement to make every effort to investigate it and apprehend the perpetrators of the “anti-Jewish aggression”... Read more.