Fed Up In France …

When the Free French Army's 2nd Armored Division helped liberate Paris 60 years ago last week, a 24-year-old Algerian Jew named Robert Elbeze marched in its ranks. He went on to marry a woman from an Alsatian Jewish family, settle in Paris' historically Jewish Marais neighborhood and raise a family as a proud citizen of the French republic.

His son Alain is still here, but his faith in the republic is gone. Disturbed by the increasing pace of attacks against Jews and their property in France, Alain Elbeze, 52, has resolved to move with his wife and five children to Israel. "Look at this," he says, gesturing at the barriers erected in front of his synagogue on the Boulevard de Belleville in Paris' east end. "I didn't have to grow up with this, and I don't want my kids to have to."

He's not alone. The Jewish population of France — at 600,000, the world's largest outside Israel and the U.S. — is in an uproar. "At my synagogue, it doesn't matter whether you talk to a doctor or a worker — all of them want to leave," says Elbeze. And more and more are doing so. French immigration to Israel climbed to 2,083 last year from 1,366 in 1999, according to the Jewish Agency, the Israeli body that handles immigration; it could total 3,000 by the end of this year. The Israeli government is receptive: in July, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon set off a diplomatic flap when he called on French Jews to "move to Israel as early as possible," and later welcomed 200 new French immigrants at Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv to "the only place where you can be safe."

Most who make the move blame rising anti-Semitism. Jews have historically struggled in France, from the 13th century Trial of the Talmud to persecution during the Nazi occupation; but they have also flourished, providing two French Prime Ministers in the 20th century (Léon Blum and Pierre Mendès-France). Today many feel under siege both from the country's 6 million-strong Muslim population and from far-right political movements like the National Front. The French Justice Ministry announced last week that it registered 298 "anti-Semitic acts" so far this year, compared to 108 for all of 2003. The desecration of three Jewish cemeteries in recent months was followed last week by an arson attack that destroyed a former synagogue serving as a soup kitchen and social center in eastern Paris. President Jacques Chirac and Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë expressed outrage over the incidents, but outrage isn't enough for Jewish leaders or their communities. When the few cases of violence or vandalism that are prosecuted reach the courts, they claim, the courts don't take their concerns seriously. They are rankled, for instance, over an August administrative appeals court ruling to reinstate two 11-year-old boys who had hit and insulted a Jewish classmate at Paris' élite Lycée Montaigne. "Now it's the victim who has to change schools," as Rabbi Claude Zaffran puts it.