Amid fresh wave of antisemitism, some French Jews resort to fake names

Yael has lived in her Paris apartment for 30 years. She had always felt safe in her residential area with a large Jewish community. But last year, she and her husband decided to remove the mezuzah from their front doorway.

The rectangular piece of parchment, inscribed with verses from the Torah, protected her household from harm. But it was also a signal to the outside world that a Jewish family lived here.

“You can still see the trace of it next to the door,” says Yael, placing a tray of almond biscuits left over from Yom Kippur on her coffee table. “I need to paint over it.”

Tears sting Yael’s eyes as she talks about one of her sons, who lives in Israel. She’s worried sick about him. But she is also scared for her two other sons who live in Paris. She tells them not to go out wearing a kippah, a religious head covering, and is cautious about opening the door to delivery workers. Someone recently tagged their car with “dirty Jew.”

“Since Oct. 7, life has completely changed,” says Yael, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. To protect her safety, she asked to be identified only by her first name. “I’m afraid. I hear the smallest noise and I jump.”

A July 2024 study by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights says European Jews feel more unsafe than ever. And nowhere more so than in France.

The country is home to the second-largest Jewish community outside Israel, after the United States – comprising around 500,000 people. It is also the European country that has seen the sharpest rise in antisemitic acts since Hamas militants killed some 1,200 people and took 253 hostages a year ago, according to the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions.

“Whether it’s within civil society, on social media, or politics, we see the conflation of the conflict in the Middle East with regular Jewish citizens,” says Robert Ejnès, the council’s executive director.

“Every time there’s an escalation of the conflict, we see a new wave of antisemitic acts in France. We need more sanctions to punish these acts, but also more education if we want to improve things in the future,” he says.

As feelings of insecurity rise, more and more French Jews are talking about leaving – for Israel or the U.S. Still, the vast majority stays. They have found ways to overcome their fears or to live with them – many defiantly. It’s the small daily acts, they say, that help them feel safe.

Stella Rosen, a Parisian doctor, recently gave the post office a fake, “more French-sounding” name for deliveries. She has also stopped taking Ubers after several uncomfortable conversations with male drivers who supported the Palestinian cause, made clear they understood she was Jewish, and knew her home address.

“I need to protect myself, but also my kids,” says Dr. Rosen, who has two young sons. “It’s just not worth the risk.”

A recent turning point

Jews have lived in France for over 2,000 years, making them one of the oldest Jewish populations in Western Europe. France was the first European country to emancipate the Jewish people, during the French Revolution, and Jewish street names and quarters can be found across the country.

But in recent years, attitudes toward Jews have appeared to harden in some French minds. “Everything changed with the second intifada,” says Philippe Boukara, a French historian of contemporary Judaism.

The uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation, lasting from 2000 to 2005, brought in its wake an unprecedented number of antisemitic acts in France: 970 in 2004.

That record was surpassed last year, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. In 2023, France recorded 1,676 antisemitic incidents, compared with 436 in 2022, according to data from the French Interior Ministry and the Service for the Protection of the Jewish Community. Around 75% of them occurred in the three months following the attack.

That has prompted more French Jews to apply for Israeli nationality and residence rights; in the last three months of 2023, some 1,200 began applications to emigrate to Israel, or to “make aliyah,” a 430% increase over the same period in 2022.

Still, the number of Jews who actually leave has been falling each year for nearly a decade. Most simply do not want to leave their homes in France, and certainly not when Israel is engaged in active conflict. Instead, they’re adapting to the current situation by changing their everyday behavior.

Anna, a Parisian architect, has taken to covering herself and her two young daughters with kaffiyehs – the black-and-white checkered scarves that have become symbols of Palestinian nationalism – when she visits her grandmother in a Paris suburb with a large Muslim population.

There is no evidence that antisemitic acts are committed more frequently by French Muslims than by extreme far-left or far-right antisemites. But because French Muslims generally support the Palestinian cause, many French Jews – with or without reason – are afraid they might be harassed.

“I’m responsible for my daughters’ safety,” says Anna, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym. “It’s not the time to be a hero.”

Safety in numbers

People like Christine Taieb see this sort of attitude as evidence that more education is needed if Jews and Muslims are to feel safe in France.

Ms. Taieb leads the Paris branch of Judeo-Muslim Friendship in France, a group that seeks to encourage interfaith dialogue and understanding between the two communities.

“We teach people to respect and listen to others, and learn from their experiences,” says Ms. Taieb. “The goal is to extend a hand to the person on the other side.”

Ms. Taieb says she has never personally been subjected to antisemitic remarks and refuses to be afraid. That’s a recurrent theme among Jews living in a heavily Orthodox community in the northeast of Paris.

On a sunny weekday afternoon, young men proudly wear their kippahs at stands selling etrog – a citrus fruit used to observe this week’s Sukkot holiday. The soldiers often stationed in front of a nearby school have left, stood down after an Oct. 7 anniversary alert. Hundreds of schoolchildren filter out into waiting buses and cars.

“I was educated from a young age that we should all be able to live together, that there are good people and bad. Why should I be scared?” says David Benchetrit, an etrog seller, holding out a fruit to a prospective client. “But there’s definitely a feeling of safety in numbers.”

There is a sense of defiance among many in the Jewish community here – not to give up and let fear win. Rebecca, who stops for a sandwich at a local kosher bakery, says she’s not a scared person by nature and won’t become one now.

“People tell me to be careful, to change my daily habits,” says Rebecca, who asked to be identified by her first name only to protect her family. “But I refuse to enter into that fear. The day I do that, I’ll leave.”

Still, Rebecca says she has taken down her mezuzah and changed her last name for home deliveries. Last year, she went ahead and completed her application to make aliyah – just in case.