Schools set on fire in the Paris suburbs, students hurling objects at police in Rennes and Grenoble, and nearly 5,000 arrests have pushed Israel’s government to plan for something it has seen before: French Jews heading for the airport. The Bible named the force behind this moment four thousand years ago. Ishmael, Yishma-El in Hebrew, means “God will hear,” and the Sages taught that the pressure from Ishmael’s descendants at the end of days would bring the cry of the Jewish people before God and the Jews of the exile back to their land.
At the cabinet meeting on Tuesday, October 6, Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer told ministers that Israel should prepare to absorb a potential mass wave of immigration by French Jews, according to two sources who attended the meeting.
“We need to remove the barriers in order to allow them to come here,” Sofer said, adding that the plan should also help less affluent members of France’s Jewish community. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Sofer, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli to prepare a joint plan. Smotrich said funding should go toward economically vulnerable immigrants and toward housing projects for the expected wave.
National Missions Minister Orit Strock warned in the same meeting that the unrest could turn on France’s Jews. “Jews are currently afraid to walk the streets,” Strock said.
The protests quickly turned violent. According to the French Education Ministry, around 24 schools have been set on fire or looted and 78 education staff members have been injured. The Justice Ministry reported that 735 of France’s roughly 3,700 schools have been affected by the violence, and about 85% of those arrested are minors. Critics have accused the far-left La France Insoumise party, led by staunchly anti-Israel politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of inciting the violence, and have pointed to the involvement of immigrants and the children of immigrants in the street clashes.
The cabinet discussion came as French aliyah (immigration to Israel) is running at a pace not seen in nearly a decade. Nearly 4,000 French Jews have immigrated to Israel so far this year, 40% more than in the same period last year, a figure the Jerusalem Post described as a record. The year is on pace to be the strongest for French aliyah since the great wave of 2014 to 2016, when surging antisemitism and Islamist terror drove 7,231 French Jews to Israel in 2014, a record 7,900 in 2015, and 5,000 in 2016
The current climb began with the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. In 2023, 1,097 French Jews made aliyah. That figure more than doubled to 2,234 in 2024 and climbed to 3,357 in 2025. In all, more than 7,000 French Jews have moved to Israel since the war began. Of the roughly 80,000 Jews worldwide who have opened aliyah files with the Jewish Agency since October 7, about 20,000 are from France.
No comments:
Post a Comment