Paris’s Jewish community retreats in shock after deadly end to siege | World news | The GuardianParis’s Jewish community retreats in shock after deadly end to siege | World news | The Guardian










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Charlie Hebdo attack



Paris’s Jewish community retreats in shock after deadly end to siege









Residents of neighbourhood where policewoman was shot dead say gunman Amedy Coulibaly intended to target Jewish school














Residents of Paris’s Jewish neighbourhoods came to pay their respects at the supermarket where four shoppers were murdered by an extremist on Friday. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images




Anne Penketh in Paris


Saturday 10 January 2015 11.38 EST







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The gunman who killed four shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday may have planned to attack a Jewish school the day before but was thwarted by a car accident, local residents believe.
As people in the French capital’s Jewish neighbourhoods retreated behind shuttered store windows and headed to Sabbath services, they spoke of the fear that has gripped their community following the violent climax to two hostage-takings in which the three gunmen were killed.
“Everyone will tell you that we’re all in shock,” said teacher Isaac Berg, who was in the Hypercacher kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes only 15 minutes before Amedy Coulibaly burst into the store with an assault rifle on Friday.
“We’re afraid, but what more could the government do to protect us?” said Berg. “Our schools and places of worship have already been guarded for the last two years. People wouldn’t want a police escort to go shopping.”
In the southern district of Montrouge, where Coulibaly shot a policewoman dead on Thursday morning, residents said they were convinced he had originally intended to attack a Jewish school and synagogue less than 100 yards away from the shooting.
“Everyone thinks he was on his way to the school,” said an employee in the La Ronde des Pains bakery, who rushed out when he heard gunshots just after 8am on Thursday a few yards away on the avenue Pierre Brossolette. “At first I thought it was a joke, but then I saw everyone running away and came back inside.”



Amedy Coulibaly only needed to turn right at the next traffic lights to reach the school and synagogue on the Rue Gabriel Péri.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images


The employee, Hassan Tlilli, said Coulibaly was travelling on the main road in the direction of Paris when he got out of his car at a traffic accident which a policewoman was investigating.
“It was the accident that prevented him from going there (to the school),” said Tlilli. Coulibaly only needed to turn right at the next traffic lights to reach the school and synagogue on the Rue Gabriel Péri.
Other residents said they were mystified as to why Coulibaly, who lived in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a 12-minute car journey south of Montrouge, would have gone all the way to their town to shoot a policewoman. “It doesn’t make any sense,” said a woman who gave her name as Carole as she stood looking at tributes of flowers to 25-year-old policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe, from Martinique. “She was black, like him. Why would he do that?”
“There are a lot of Jews in this area. We only started talking about them being a target when they said he was linked to the other two terrorists,” said a woman working at a tobacconist near the scene.
Jeannine Barsac’s chemist shop, which she runs with her husband Christian, was closed when the shooting took place a few yards away. She has no doubt that “the real target was the school. We think he shot the policewoman when he saw the uniform.”
Coulibaly himself said in a phonecall to BFM TV that the three terrorists had synchronised the attacks. He said that while Chérif and Saïd Kouachi hit the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, “I began with policemen.” He targeted the supermarket “because it was Jewish”.
The umbrella agency for France’s Jewish organisations, the CRIF, condemned the Vincennes hostage-taking saying: “These French fellow citizens were slaughtered coldly and pitilessly, because they were Jewish.” The four victims were named on Saturday as Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen and Francois-Michel Saada.
Two policemen armed with assault rifles stood guard on Saturday morning outside the Montrouge synagogue, where the names of 60 Jews deported during the second world war are commemorated. Round the corner, as worshippers arrived for a religious service, guarded by police, one woman said: “Please don’t disturb us. Not on the Sabbath.”
At the Montrouge town hall, mayor Jean-Loup Metton of the centre-right UDI party said he did not know whether the Jewish community was Coulibaly’s original target. He added that it was not only the Jewish community “but all the people of Montrouge, all the French who are shocked”.
France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, about 600,000-strong, as well as its largest number of Muslims, estimated at 5 million. After a spate of deadly antisemitic attacks, 7,000 French citizens emigrated to Israel last year, more than double the number the previous year, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel.
The Jewish community is haunted by the shootings in 2012 in and around Toulouse by jihadist Mohammed Merah. Four people at a Jewish school were among his seven victims before he was shot dead after a police siege.
In the most recent antisemitic attack, a Jewish couple was robbed and the woman raped in their home in the Paris suburb of Creteil last month.
Several Paris synagogues decided to shut their doors on Saturday after the violence against the community. The closest synagogue to the kosher supermarket in Vincennes, about 400 yards away, was sealed off on Saturday and guarded by an armed policeman. Synagogue officials refused to comment.
During the hostage-taking in Vincennes, the Jewish Protection Service warned that all the main and secondary entrances to community buildings should be under guard. “DO NOT ALLOW ANYONE apart from people known to you” inside, it continued, and recommended the use of all security measures including video surveillance and code numbers.
The leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France (MJLF), Marc Konczaty said: “Above all it’s France which is under attack.”



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