At least 10 Jewish homes and businesses around Paris and a synagogue in the northern French city of Rouen have been defaced, according to police, with antisemitism being considered as a motive.
The acts of vandalism came as France marked 10 years since the Paris terrorist attacks that shook the country. Twelve people were killed at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and five people were killed in the subsequent antisemitic attacks on a kosher supermarket in January 2015.
Buildings in the Parisian suburbs of Vincennes, Saint-Mandé and Fontenay-sous-Bois, many located near the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket where the attacks took place a decade ago, were affected on Sunday and Monday, police said. A rabbi’s home and a synagogue in Rouen were also targeted with antisemitic messages and swastikas scrawled on the buildings.
The synagogue that was vandalized in Rouen was previously a target of attempted arson in May last year and was also sprayed with graffiti in December during Hanukkah. The messages found on the synagogue walls Monday called for Jewish people to be “gassed,” according to Natacha Ben Haïm, the president of the Israelite Religious Association of Rouen, who manages the synagogue.
Ben Haïm has filed a lawsuit against the perpetrators, who remain unknown, for “public provocation of hatred.”
In the country home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, the number of antisemitic incidents recorded in 2023 almost quadrupled in a year, with 1,676 cases reported, according to data from the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France.
“Discovering these tags in Rouen, it’s a double symbol, a symbol because it falls on the anniversary of the Hyper Cacher attack, and a symbol because it targets the Rouen synagogue, which was the victim of arson a few months ago,” said the president of Representative Council of Jewish institutions in France, Yonathan Arfi, on French radio RTL on Tuesday.
French interior minister Bruno Retailleau denounced the vandalism targeting the French Jewish community, and the growing antisemitism.
“The Jewish community represents less than 1% of the population, and is the victim of 57% of all anti-religious attacks,” Retailleau told French media Tuesday.