A 67-year-old man wearing a kippah was violently attacked by a man who made antisemitic threats in Yerres (Essonne), a suburb south of Paris.
According to a police source, the attack took place around 7:45 a.m. in the town in the northern Essonne region, bordering Val-de-Marne.
“Dirty Jew, I’m going to kill you,” the attacker repeated, according to the source.
“An investigation is underway into the charges of attempted robbery with violence resulting in a total incapacity for work of more than eight days committed on religious grounds and for death threats on religious grounds,” said Grégoire Dulin, public prosecutor of Evry.
The investigation has been entrusted to the Essonne Territorial Crime Directorate. No arrests have been made at this stage, the magistrate specified.
The man, who was beaten according to the police source, “is no longer hospitalized” and “has been given a 15-day total work incapacity order,” Dulin said late Sunday afternoon.
“His eye is very, very swollen,” Mendel Gourevitch, director of the yeshiva in Brunoy, a neighboring town of Yerres, told AFP. He described himself as a “close friend” of the victim.
“He had the courage to come to the service this (Sunday) morning,” he noted, “he didn’t want to go into panic and fear.”
“This is the first time” that such an attack has occurred in a relatively “calm” area, the principal added, adding that he was “very surprised” and that “everyone is worried,” including the parents of his school’s students.
“He is very shocked, he wonders where his country is going,” said Benjamin Allouche, president of the Assembly of Jewish Communities of Essonne, told Le Parisienne on Sunday. “For the moment, he is still disoriented and confused.”
Allouche added that “again and again, the Jewish community, French citizens of the Jewish faith, are paying the price for stigmatization. We are being blamed for what is happening (in Gaza) on the right, on the left… This gentleman was out for a walk, he wasn’t claiming anything. He looks like a rabbi, and he was simply attacked because he is Jewish. There was no discussion, not a word before the blows.”
“I can only sympathize,” said Michel Serfaty, the rabbi of Ris-Orangis, also in Essonne. “Today, in France, this is not an extraordinary event,” he lamented to AFP, adding that people should not let it “perpetuate fear and psychosis.”
Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) president Yonathan Arfi took to X on Sunday to decry the “antisemitic aggression in Yerres following those against rabbis in Orléans, Deauville, Neuilly, Levallois in recent months” and to ask “how long will this repeated hatred be tolerated?”
“No one will uproot the Jews from France. But it is high time to uproot the antisemitism that is festering in society, using a conflict 3,000 km away as a pretext,” he said.
He ended by expressing his “support for the victim attacked yesterday and solidarity with their loved ones.”
