July 8, 2008

By Celestine Bohlen, Bloomberg News

When a 17-year-old Jewish boy was beaten unconscious by a gang of black and Arab youths during a balmy June evening on Rue Petit in Paris, residents weren't surprised.

"I could feel things were heating up," says Jean-Jacques Giannesini, a City Council member for the 19th Arrondissement, home to France's largest Orthodox Jewish community and the site of the attack. Just weeks before the incident, he had written to the police with an urgent plea for help, fearing clashes.

"It is drug dealers whose idea for a sport on Saturday afternoons is hitting Jews," Giannesini says. "They have it in their heads that they are re-enacting the Israeli-Palestinian wars."

The June 21 attack on Rudy, as the boy has been identified, is the latest in a series of incidents that is testing the ability of Western Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish populations to live in close proximity.

The violence of the assault last month stirred a storm of indignation. President Nicolas Sarkozy, on a state visit to Israel days later, said he was "shocked" that a boy could be attacked just because he was wearing a kippah, or yarmulke.

Assaults, both physical and verbal, against Jews reached a peak of 1,000 in 2004, even after the former president, Jacques Chirac, famously said following one such event in 2003 that "an attack on a Jew is an attack against France."

In other countries, "the problem is the extreme right," says Eli Sultan, 35, who opened a Judaica gift shop on Rue Petit five years ago. "Here, there are other factors, including a large Muslim population."

The people on this street - a drab stretch of low-rise buildings interspersed with shops offering Jewish toys and gifts and kosher groceries - question whether the attack reflects a rise in racial tensions or a running war between rival gangs.

"There is a problem, which is a problem of violence and of delinquency," says Andre Touboul, director of Beth Hanna school on Rue Petit, the largest Lubavitch school in Europe, with 2,000 children. "I cannot say it is a war of religion."

A lot of young people are out of work in the neighborhood, which has broader delinquency issues, says Mao Peninou, the 19th Arrondissement's deputy mayor. "What we are dealing with is anti-Semitism on one side and racism on the other."

The area, on the northeast edge of Paris, borders the poorest suburbs and has one of the city's highest unemployment rates. It also has the city's youngest population and a disproportionate number of public-housing blocks, with high concentrations of families of Arab and African origins.

The tightly knit Jewish community there has expanded steadily since the 1980s, as Orthodox families moved from suburbs, many to live in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood with religious schools close at hand.

Of the 99 reported anti-Semitic acts in Paris in 2007 - down from 173 in 2006 - 19 were in the 19th Arrondissement, police figures show.

"It's the kind of thing that could happen anywhere, but it happens more frequently in the 19th," says Marc Knobel, a researcher at the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, the country's largest Jewish group. "It has elements of a 'West Side Story,"' he says.

Prompted by a fear of attacks and driven by a Zionist imperative, some French Jews have left for their "aliyah," or immigration to Israel. In 2007, 2,717 people departed, following 2,830 the year before, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. France has almost 600,000 Jews, about 1 percent of the population.

"I will not accept that one single Jew leaves France because of fear," said Sarkozy, whose maternal grandfather was Jewish, at the Hotel King David in Jerusalem on June 23, addressing Israel's French community.

In the 19th Arrondissement, anti-Semitic incidents range from ripping mezuzas, or Jewish prayer holders, from doorways and scrawling swastikas on mailboxes to shouting verbal abuse at Jewish families who go to Buttes-Chaumont, a nearby park, for a stroll on the Sabbath.

"For the past two years, usually on Saturdays when Jewish families are there, gangs of Arab or African kids get together," says Sammy Ghozlan, president of the National Bureau of Vigilance against Anti-Semitism, an organization based in Drancy, France.

Ghozlan says there aren't any Jewish gangs, only groups of Jewish kids who congregate in the park, fighting sometimes in self-defense. Other residents aren't so definite. "It is possible," says Touboul, the school director, when asked if young Jewish boys have formed their own gangs.

The victim of the June 21 attack came out of a coma two days after the assault. His mother, interviewed June 25 on France 2 television, confirmed that Rudy was once held by the police. The incident involved a fight he got into during a pro-Israel demonstration on Dec. 9, 2007, Le Nouvel Observateur magazine reported this month.

Ghozlan, who conducted his own investigation of the attack, says tensions began early in the day and continued with a series of escalating confrontations between Jewish teens and black and Arab youths. The police are still seeking the assailants.

"We thought if we were more numerous, we would be less afraid," says Sultan, the Rue Petit shopkeeper. "It turns out to be the contrary."