The Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) is organizing a commemorative ceremony on Monday, October 7 at the Dôme de Paris-Palais des sports, in tribute to the victims of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and in support of the hostages. . For its president, Yonathan Arfi, October 7 is “also a revealer of French divisions”. For a year now, France has been experiencing, in his opinion, a period of “clarification of everyone’s positions on the issue of anti-Semitism”.
What memory do you have of October 7?
What I retain is the sudden feeling of dizzying insecurity and immense vulnerability. For Jews around the world, the State of Israel has played a symbolic role of reassurance since its creation. That day, beyond the trauma of the real-time images of an abominable massacre, this was also what collapsed. October 7 brought back the ghosts of historical persecutions. If since then this feeling of vulnerability has gradually faded, the trauma leaves its traces: as a form of historical regression, as if we had been projected to times that we believed to be past, in which the Jewish people were more fragile, more threatened, more persecuted.
Would you characterize the Hamas terrorist attack as a “pogrom”?
October 7 will remain a unique event that cannot be reduced to an existing category. In some ways, it is a pogrom; In others, it is an act of mass terrorism like 9/11 or 11/13. If the images of these civilian populations surrendered to the barbarity of the Hamas hordes have returned the Jewish collective unconscious to images of pogroms, October 7 remains, for the moment, unclassifiable. In two days we will commemorate this massacre, although in Jewish tradition, after a year, we symbolically move from a time of mourning to a time of remembrance. But how can we move on to the moment of remembrance, when the war is still going on, when there are still hostages?
What changed on October 7 for French Jews?
Since the first images on October 7, many only saw Palestinian attackers attacking Israelis. However, as they slaughter their victims, what the Hamas terrorists shout is not “Death to the Israelis,” but “Death to the Jews”! What French Jews clearly perceived, at that moment, was the engine at work, that of genocidal intent and hatred of Jews. Far beyond a geopolitical conflict, October 7 was above all the epicenter of a powerful anti-Semitic earthquake, whose aftershocks were felt throughout the world.
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