FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to hold a series of meetings aimed at solving the problem of rising anti-Semitism, according to a French Jewish leader.
Richard Prasquier, who heads the the umbrella group CRIF, also told reporters after a CRIF meeting with Sarkozy that the French leader said he would “further invest” in the issue.
CRIF leaders met with Sarkozy to convey the “concern” of French Jews over the increased anti-Semitism. Prasquier asked Sarkozy to beef up efforts at controlling anti-Jewish incidents, which have risen dramatically since Israel’s Gaza offensive.
Prasquier also described to the president Jewish concerns over “an anti-Semitism which has very strongly settled in a part of the [French] population, especially among some youth, and which expresses itself extremely quickly and brutally as soon as a match is sparked.”
Since the end of December, when Israel started its 22-day Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, the French government has enacted measures to increase security around Jewish institutions and anti-Israel protests.
Between Dec. 27 and Jan. 26, the SPCJ Jewish protection service tallied 113 anti-Semitic crimes against individuals and institutions. In all of 2007, the group recorded 386 acts, according to its affiliated CRIF Web site. The SPCJ coordinates with the French Interior Ministry.
In another development, a database of Ukrainian Holocaust victims and survivors was turned over to a Yad Vashem representative.
The database, with information collected during a gathering of survivors in Ukraine’s Charkassy and Chernigovskaya regions, includes the testimonies of survivors or relatives of the victims, a list of Holocaust victims including more than 3,000 names identified and published for the first time, places of execution and photos.
The information will be used for a joint project between the Jewish Council of Ukraine and Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, called the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project.
“For the first time on the territory of one of the former Soviet republics, we received data from every possible source concerning the history of Jews during the Holocaust in two of Ukraine’s regions,” said Boris Maftsir, a manager of the project in the former Soviet Union.
The handover of the database’s disks took place during a meeting to discuss the project, whose participants include Jewish leaders and survivors, diplomats and righteous people, representatives of Jewish international and Israeli organizations, researchers and students, and journalists.
The Jewish Council of Ukraine and Yad Vashem initiated and co-organized the event.