A man in his 40s intimidated passersby with a knife on Friday near a synagogue in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a heavily Jewish and affluent suburb of Paris.
Prosecutors told AFP that the man threatened at least four people wearing kippahs near the synagogue and an adjacent Jewish school just before Shabbat began. They are looking into the motives and investigating the possibility that the man targeted Jews in an antisemitic incident, the report said.
The suspect pursued one of his victims into a perfume and makeup shop, where police arrested him without a struggle, AFP reported.
Mayor Jean-Christophe Fromantin said in a statement: “We must remain alert and mobilize against the rise of antisemitism.”
In recent years, Neuilly-sur-Seine has seen the arrival of many Jewish families from other parts of the Paris region, who moved there for the relative security and the local Jewish schools as well as the non-Jewish ones, where antisemitic bullying is rare.
The number of antisemitic physical assaults recorded in France last year was the highest in more than a decade, with 106 reported cases documented by the SPCJ (Service de protection de la communauté juive).
Muslims or people from Muslim-majority countries or backgrounds are responsible for the majority of antisemitism incidents in France, according to the BNVCA (Bureau national de vigilance contre l’antisémitisme).
SPCJ recorded 1,570 antisemitic incidents last year, a slight decrease from the 1,676 reported cases the previous year. The 2024 tally is still one of the highest on record. In 2012-2022, France saw an average of 540 antisemitic incidents annually.
Over the weekend, unidentified culprits vandalized a memorial monument for victims of the Holocaust in Lyon. The perpetrators etched “Free Gaza” onto the monument’s black marble surface.
“To defile the memory of Holocaust victims is to attempt to Nazify the Jews, but it is also to attack the fundamental values of the Republic,” Yonathan Arfi, the president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, wrote on X Sunday.
