Paris Moishe House Will Open Amid Increased Anti-Semitic Attacks
Image by Getty Images
Paris will see the opening of its first Moishe House amid a soaring number of anti-Semitic attacks in France.
The launching party for the Moishe House in central Paris’ 11th Arrondissement, or district, is scheduled to take place next week, but the three residents moved into the apartment in recent weeks, Aurelie Attia, one of the residents, told JTA on Monday.
Moishe House is a project that subsidizes housing for young Jewish adults interested in setting up a community.
Following 15 months of preparation, the opening comes at a difficult time for Jews in France with a near doubling of anti-Semitic attacks in the first seven months of 2014 compared to the previous year. The rise is believed to have been triggered by Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza this summer.
Even before the increase, anti-Semitism was cited as a major factor for record levels of immigration to Israel by French Jews this year and in 2013.
“Yes, the past few weeks have been terrible, but we are going ahead with our plans because we cannot live according to how people speak about us or how they threaten us,” Attia told JTA.
“We are taking precautions, not making the address known and opening the door only to invited guests, but we are not afraid. We are confident our efforts to build a young community will succeed and we are excited.”
The residents, who will be living near the so-called Synagogue de le Roquette, have undertaken to organize five to six programs in their apartment per month, including celebrating Jewish holidays together and holding Shabbat dinners for their Jewish friends and wider networks, among other community-building activities. Opening the same week as Moishe House Paris are Moishe Houses in Prague and Cape Town.
Founded in 2006, the Moishe House project has 69 houses in 17 countries, with operations being run from three offices — two in the United States and another in London. In 2013, Moishe Houses hosted some 4,500 programs engaging some 80,000 attendees.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
