Two young Jews were attacked in France this week, one in Marseille and one in
Toulouse, where almost a year ago an Islamist terrorist killed three soldiers
and four Jews before police shot him dead.
The most traumatic incident
occurred Wednesday at the entrance to the Ohr Torah school in Toulouse, the same
place where Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah opened fire on March 19, 2012, on
two Jewish pupils, their father and the headmaster’s daughter.
The school
changed its name after the tragic events from Otzar Hatorah to Ohr
Torah.
In the recent incident, a middle school pupil was leaving the
school to go home, wearing a kippa, when a woman suddenly brandished a knife at
him. He ran back into the building, where guards called security
services.
They arrived immediately and arrested the woman, known as a
mentally ill neighbor who had spent time in a psychiatric hospital. She didn’t
say a word and didn’t try to explain herself, according to police and Jewish
sources.
The woman was put under psychiatric watch.
The second
attack took place outside Marseille’s main railway station, Gare Saint- Charles,
at 3:30 p.m. on Monday.
A 20-year-old Jewish man, wearing a gold Magen
David pendant, was leaving the station, which is also a large shopping mall,
when two young men on a scooter approached him, tore off the chain from his neck
and drove away.
A group of young men standing nearby came over and
insulted the victim, using anti-Semitic language, hit him, and stole his MP3
player and 100 euros, according to the Metro newspaper.
The police opened
an investigation, treating the case as an anti-Semitic attack.
Eugene
Caselli, the president of the Urban Community of Marseille Provence Métropole,
which has a high percentage of residents of North African origin, expressing his
“profound indignation and rage at this unacceptable act of racist
violence.”
There has been a 45 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents
in France since the Merah attack, as recorded by SPCJ, the security service of
the French Jewish community.
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