2015:
French Jewish groups, including Western Europe’s largest charity for Jews, signed a declaration of principles for coordinated efforts to provide relief for Syrian refugees.
The declaration, initiated by French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia and published Thursday, states each of the six co-signatory groups will “act to accompany the refugees, each according to its competences and abilities and with its traditional partners,” but “especially in administrative and medical matters.”
In recent weeks, tens of thousands of migrants, including refugees, have entered the European Union, where a strong public reaction developed to the publication of images of the migrants’ plight and the loss of life among refugees who drowned or suffocated while trying to make it across the border.
Many are refugees from the civil war in Syria. Others come from failed or impoverished countries in the Middle East and Africa.
The signatories to Korsia’s declaration — including the Fonds Social Juif Unifie, which has an annual budget of roughly $10 million and the Union of Jewish Students of France, or UEJF — wrote that their initiative was “guided by the notion of tikkun olam – repairing the world – in Jewish philosophy and out of awareness of a moral struggle occurring in a society too characterized, at times, by individualism.”
French-Jewish families are being forced from their homes in Paris suburbs as Europe continues to be convulsed by levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the end of the Second World War.
The Paris commuter newspaper 20 Minutes documents an “internal exodus” during 2017 of Jews from the Seine-Saint-Denis department, saying it is emblematic of broader concerns that French Jews, like their brothers and sisters across Europe, are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile their faith with the changing demographics of the continent.
The paper reports that Jews are leaving their homes on the northeastern fringe of Paris to escape the open hostility that French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Sunday condemned as “well-rooted.” The newspaper reports:
This ‘internal exodus’ is difficult to quantify, but it is clear that many synagogues of Seine-Saint-Denis have closed, for lack of people. In Pierrefitte, the rabbi has recorded a 50 percent decline in the congregations since his arrival thirteen years ago. A similar story is told in (nearby) Bondy, where attendance on Yom Kippur (the holiest day of the Jewish calendar) has fallen from about 800 to 400 in the last decade.
The Bondy synagogue president saw a “deteriorating climate” of the last 15 years as driving the exodus, “It’s hard to explain, it’s provocations, it’s looks,” he lamented. “There are places where we do not feel welcome.”
OK, then. Run Oft to Israel and take your Tikkun Olam with you...but where are the Christians of Paris supposed to run oft to?
From Tikkun Olam - repair the world - to ללא שם: הו אה, אנחנו פישל- up, בוא נעבור לעזאזל outta כאן
We messed-up, let's
get the hell outta here.
From Tikkun Olam - repair the world - to ללא שם: הו אה, אנחנו פישל- up, בוא נעבור לעזאזל outta כאן
We messed-up, let's
get the hell outta here.