The Paris offices of a Jewish organization were blown up this morning and anti-Semitic slogans painted on a synagogue in Nimes, in southern France. At the same time, some 500 people demonstrated in Avignon, less than 100 miles from Nimes, to protest the upsurge of neo-Nazi ideologies in the country. All three incidents are unconnected.
The offices of Betar, the youth organization of the Herut Party, were seriously damaged by a bomb explosion which wrecked the main door, shattered windows and made the main meeting hall unusable. A few hours after the explosion, an anony- mous phone caller to the French news agency AFP said that “the Front for French National Liberation,” an organization believed by the police to comprise rightwing activists, assumed responsibility for the blast.
The caller said the attack was carried out “to protest against the racist, anti-French attitude of the Zionists and the fact that our country (France) has become the racial sewer of the world. There were no casualties and police said they had no immediate clues.
In Nimes, anti-Semitic slogans were painted during the night on the local synagogue walls. The inscriptions said “Hitler Will Be Back,” and “Watch Out: the SS are Here.” In Avignon, some 500 former resistance fighters and many army veterans marched through the center of the city carrying posters with the names of former concentration camps. The march, which was called to protest the rise of neo-Nazism in France, ended in the town square where a wreath was laid on the monument to former resistance fighters and deportees.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
