(JTA) — Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe was criticized for adjourning city council talks early on Yom Kippur.
Following the early suspension of deliberations at the Council of Paris on Sept. 25, council member Gilles Alayrac said, “The mayor devotes too much attention to religious sensitivities.” The newspaper Le Parisien also quoted Alayrac, a representative of the Radical Party of the Left, as saying that “only the Republican calendar matters.”
Alexis Corbiere, also a representative of the Radical Party of the Left, said that “The real problem is public spending on religious venues.”
They and other members of their party have expressed opposition in the past to subsidies given to approximately 20 Jewish kindergartens in Paris.
“My friend Gilles panics when he is required to be attentive to others,” Delanoe, who is not Jewish, told Le Parisien. “If we had scheduled a meeting for Dec. 24, he would protest.”
In 2011, Alayrac said that organizers of a song festival featuring French classics should not have been allowed to hold the event because “under the guise of defending French traditions, their objective is to directly attack Islam.”
The city council was scheduled to hold discussions on Sept. 25-26 until Delanoe, of the Socialist Party, rescheduled the deliberations to take place next month.
