French Jews look to emigrate amid rising anti-Semitism

(The Christian Science Monitor) On a gloomy winter’s afternoon, a group of mothers chatted as they waited outside a primary school for their children to emerge. But it was not a typical Parisian scene: soldiers armed with automatic weapons patrolled the surroundings.

“I’m scared,” said Vanessa Ganum, who came to pick up her daughter at Beth Hanna, a Jewish school.

After the murder of four Jews on January 9 at a kosher supermarket, many in France’s Jewish community are thinking of emigrating, joining a rising tide of their coreligionists who have fled increasing anti-Semitism in recent years. Others hope that the attack, and its link to the earlier massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine, will finally force ordinary French people to face up to the fact that their fellow citizens commit more anti-Semitic crimes than any other European country.