Feature: Memories of attacks
This week's massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia during a Hanukkah celebration reminds us of the recurring antisemitic attacks we have faced in recent history and in the news. This feature looks back at three scenes — the attack on the synagogue in Rome (1982), the attack on the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba (2023), and the massacre at the Ozar HaTorah Jewish school in Toulouse (2012) — which bear witness to what these crimes say about states, societies, and their ability to face up to the deadly violence targeting Jews.
Revisiting the Great Synagogue of Rome attack: negligence or connivance?
On the 9th of October 1982, a Palestinian commando group targeted a crowd of Roman Jews leaving the synagogue, injuring dozens of people and killing a two-year-old boy. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the attack, new documents show that the secret service had informed the Italian authorities of the impending danger but that no security arrangements for the synagogue had been put in place. A forthcoming book would confirm the existence of a secret agreement between the Italian state and Palestinian factions during the Years of Lead, but its link to the synagogue of Roma has yet to be proven.
>>> Read the investigation by Simone Disegni
On the island. After the Ghriba synagogue attack in Djerba.
At the age of thirty, Cléo Cohen is representative of a movement that is sweeping through part of the younger Sephardic generation: the desire to reconnect with their Arab history, overcoming the silence and sometimes reticence of their parents and grandparents. She lives in Tunisia, where she felt “at home”, as she puts it. Three weeks ago, Cléo Cohen was in the Ghriba synagogue when the attack took place. In this text, she talks about her anxiety during the attack, and above all about the way in which the event impacted on her journey to re-establish her roots. She evokes the latent antisemitism in Tunisian society, the antisemitism that prevents Jews from being recognised as victims, and the great silence, in Tunisia as in France, in the midst of which this antisemitism unfolds.
>>> Read the testimony by Cléo Cohen
The Jews of Toulouse, 10 years after the Ozar Hatorah School attack
In March 2012, an Islamist terrorist targeted the Ozar Hatorah Jewish School in Toulouse, France. For the first time since the Holocaust, there were Jewish children murdered close at hand in Europe. This week marks the tenth anniversary of the attack in which eight-year-old Myriam Monsonego, Jonathan Sandler and his two sons, Gabriel, three, and Arie, six, were killed. We met with Franck Touboul, the president of the the Jewish Community of Toulouse.
>>> Read the article by Georges Benayoun and Stéphane Bou
Mélenchon and Ozar HaTorah: One Massacre Too Many
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s astonishing statement about the sudden occurrence of a “major event” during the next presidential election has been widely commented upon. However, what is most surprising here is the astonishment itself that these remarks have provoked. There is nothing new in Mélenchon’s dabbling in conspiracy theories, underestimation of the seriousness of antisemitism and concomitant scolding of those who dare to worry about it.
