Aussie Jews fear for French relatives
WHEN the office of Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo became the scene of a terrorist massacre last week, French-born Bernadette Gore of Melbourne anxiously phoned her family in Paris – one family member lives close to the magazine’s office.
FULL COVERAGE IN THIS WEEK’S AJN.
WHEN the office of Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo became the scene of a terrorist massacre last week, French-born Bernadette Gore of Melbourne anxiously phoned her family in Paris – one family member lives close to the magazine’s office.
“My cousin told me ‘we are at war,’” Gore, a French-language teacher, told The AJN. “‘This is not the end,’ she said. ‘This is only the beginning.’”
For Gore, who is a Holocaust child survivor hidden by nuns in France during the Nazi occupation, her cousin’s grim analysis of events in Paris was sobering. But it took on even more gravity two days later with the slayings at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket on Friday.
Her cousin, also a Shoah survivor, “was terrified”, said Gore. “It brings back everything from during the war.”
Migrating to Australia in 1951, Gore has been running a French language learning centre in Melbourne for some 30 years. She had been intensely following the French news bulletins on SBS TV.
Gore said that with the soaring anti-Semitic violence, one elderly cousin no longer feels safe leaving the apartment. “They all feel it, but they haven’t left [the country]. Maybe their children will eventually leave.”
Temple Beth Israel cantor Michel Laloum, who has many relatives in Paris, and worked as a cantor in Lyon, contacted relatives after the attack on Hyper Cacher. “They were all traumatised. It could truly have been any of my family.”
The Melbourne chazan lamented that, as justifiable as it was to identify with the Charlie Hebdo attack, it seemed to him there was far less solidarity with the tragedy at the Jewish deli. “They’re empathising with Charlie Hebdo, they’re not empathising with the fact that they attacked not a supermarket, but a Jewish supermarket. While all of France is up in arms about Charlie Hebdo they’re not at all up in arms that the Jews were targeted.
“The good thing is that there was a Muslim who saved 15 people within that supermarket and he’s now a hero,” Laloum said.
Moroccan-born Albert Dadon, who founded the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange, phoned his sister in Lyon as soon as he heard news of the supermarket siege, as she runs a Jewish bookstore next to a kosher shop, and closed her store on police advice.
As a child growing up in France, Dadon was an avid reader of Hara Kiri, a satirical comic book to which Georges Wolinski, the Jewish satirist who was among the victims of last week’s magazine murders, contributed cartoons. Said Dadon: “For anybody growing up in France, my generation and above, this [satirical style] is part of the culture.”
PETER KOHN
People hold signs with the names of the victims in front of HyperCacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes. Picture: YOAN VALAT.
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