A 15-member delegation of Jewish leaders, representing the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC), met here today with the Deputy Consul General of France, Paul Guyomard, to express “grief and outrage” over the anti-Semitic terrorist attack in Paris Monday in which six persons were killed and 22 were wounded. The meeting was held at the French Consulate and lasted 45 minutes.
Rabbi Israel Miller, vice president of the JCRC, which is an umbrella organization of 33 Jewish organizations in the metropolitan area, told reporters after the meeting that the delegation stressed to the French official the feeling “of grief and outrage that we and our hundreds of thousands of our constituents feel at the barbaric assaults on Monday.” The delegation, Miller said, called on the French government to “spare no effort” to apprehend those responsible.
Miller also said that the delegation pointed out during the meeting that the French government’s policy toward the PLO and the anti-Israeli comments by French officials, including President Francois Mitterrand’s comparison of the war in Lebanon with the World War II massacre of 642 people by the Nazis in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, created an atmosphere which could have encourage terrorist acts against Jews in France.
“It is time that French officials recognized that anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist attitudes can no longer be separated from anti-Semitism,” Miller declared. He added that the delegation demanded that the French government should increase its protection of its Jewish citizens to avoid future atrocities against them.
SAYS FRENCH OFFICIAL WAS ‘SYMPATHETIC’
According to Miller the Deputy Consul General was “sympathetic” and promised to convey the delegation’s protest to the French government. He also said he would transmit the delegation’s view that the climate and atmosphere in France, which has been increasingly anti-Israeli since the start of the war in Lebanon, must be changed and that anti-Semitic incidents “must stop” in France.
Another participant at the meeting, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive director of the JCRC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the French Deputy Consul said he cannot draw a “linkage between the PLO and the incident” of Monday.
Hoenlein said that the Jewish leadership in New York will continue to put the issue of anti-Semitic incidents in France on the agenda and will not let it slip away as was done after the attack on Rue Copernic synagogue in 1980 and the murder of the Israeli diplomat, Yaacov Bar-Simontov, a few months ago.
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