Marseille Jewish leader: avoid wearing kippah due to terror threats
(JNS.org) The head of the Jewish community in the southern French city of Marseille has urged local Jews to avoid wearing a kippah in public, a day after an attack on a Jewish teacher by an Islamic State-inspired Muslim.
“Not wearing the kippah can save lives and nothing is more important,” Zvi Ammar told the La Provence daily newspaper. “It really hurts to reach that point but I don’t want anyone to die in Marseille because they have a kippah on their head.”
On Monday, a 15-year-old Turkish Kurd attacked a Jewish teacher—Benjamin Amsellem, who was wearing a kippah—with a machete. Amsellem sustained injuries to his shoulder and hand.
French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia, argued against the advice by Ammar.
“We should not give in to anything, we will continue to wear the kippah,” he said.
France, which is home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities, has been under a state of emergency since Islamic State terrorists murdered 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13.
Marseille is home to about 80,000 Jews, the third-largest urban population of Jews in Europe after Paris and London.
The French Jewish community on Sunday marked the first anniversary of the Islamist terror attack at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris. Four Jews were killed in that attack.
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U.S. Jewish leaders mark one year since Paris Hyper Cacher terror attack
(JNS.org) American Jewish leaders on Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of the Islamist terror attack at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris.
“We again extend our condolences to the families of those who perished and our prayers for those injured in this brutal attack as well as the victims of the Charlie Hebdo and more recent terror assaults,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman and CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
In January of 2015, Muslim terrorist Amedy Coulibaly took nearly 20 Jewish shoppers hostage at the Hyper Cacher supermarket and killed four of them. The attack came just days after the office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was also attacked by a Muslim terrorist in a shooting that killed 12 people.
“The courage and determination of French Jewry and its leadership has been inspiring. We all recognize that this scourge of terrorism and the spread of the extremist ideologies behind it are far from over. Their terrible network of death and destruction continues to spread around the globe taking countless lives of people of all faiths,” Hoenlein said.
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Holocaust novel wins Jewish literary award
(JNS.org) The Book of Aron: A Novel, by Jim Shepard, received the 2016 Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature at the midwinter meeting of the American Library Association in Boston on Sunday.
The novel, a story of an 8-year-old boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, competed for the prize with literary including “After Abel and Other Stories,” by Michal Lemberger; “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” by Primo Levi and edited by Ann Goldstein; “The House of Twenty Thousand Books,” by Sasha Abramsky; and “Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel,” by Dan Ephron.
The Sophie Brody Medal is funded by the Arthur Brody and the Brodart Foundation, and is named for Jewish leader and philanthropist Sophie Brody. Shepard’s book revolves around 8-year-old Aron, who comes from a poor Jewish family that finds itself in the Warsaw Ghetto. Aron is forced to smuggle and steal in order to survive, and ultimately is helped by Dr. Janusz Korczak, a real-life renowned Jewish doctor known for declining the offer to be saved from a Nazi so that a group of Jewish orphans would not be sent alone to the gas chambers.
Shepard is a professor at Williams College who has written six novels and collections of stories.