• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 588 0

the degree of Christianization that had taken place in the French spirit of Republicanism. This would not have been surprising to someone who had seen the German Enlightenment or the American Reform movement, but there had been nothing like this in North Africa. The synagogues of Paris, instead of chanting, played organ music. The capital had three kosher butchers for 120,000 Jews, and only two or three kosher restaurants. And the strictness of the kosher was, to North Africans, highly dubious. Few Paris Jews were kosher at all. In a typical North African assessment, Lazare Bouaziz said, “Paris Jews were very discreet. They were Jews who did not want to say they were Jewish.”

The North Africans also found French Jewish education to be inadequate, and since most of their distinguished rabbis, scholars, and educators had moved to France, they began to make their own arrangements. Rabbi Naouri was now in Paris, along with the younger rabbis who had gathered around him in Bone. One of these younger Bone rabbis was Rene-Samuel Sirat. Sirat had first come to France in 1946 as a sixteen-year-old student, and then went on to study at the ficole Rabbinique de France. At the time he was studying in Paris, there were few Sephardic Jews. On Saturday mornings he would walk across Paris to Rue Popincourt, on the eastern edge of the city, where the Salonikan community had a synagogue. These were Sephardic Jews from the Greek port of Thessaloniki. Before the war 20 percent of Thessaloniki had been Jewish, and it had been one of the most important and culturally rich Sephardic communities in Europe. The Nazis had deported 45,000 of the Thessalonikan Jews to concentration camps. The Gestapo officer in Greece, an Eichmann favorite named Alois Brunner, was later transferred to Paris, where he was able to deport more Salonikan Jews from this neighborhood, and after the war the few remnants of Salonikan Jewry were vanishing. (Brunner, who was then only in his twenties, also vanished, but he was sighted in Syria in 1986.) The synagogue on Rue Popincourt and another on Rue St.-Lazare, near Rue Bleue, were among the few places where the fifteenth-century rites and passionate music of Salonikan Jewry could still be heard. Sirat, who would not take a bus on the Sabbath, walked for more than an hour on Saturday mornings to hear this service. Today, the Rue St.-Lazare synagogue is Algerian, and the Rue Popincourt synagogue no longer functions. Another nearby Salonikan synagogue is now Moroccan.

Sirat was saddened by the general level of Jewish education in France. Few Jews went to synagogue, and on the rare occasions when they did go, they could not really carry it off because they could not read Hebrew. Jews would say a kaddish for their deceased parents by reading a text transcribed into Latin. A Holocaust survivor had written a book that was in wide usage on preparing young people for bar mitzvah. Instead of the customary intensive Torah study, it simply offered a few passages. To Sirat, the Talmud-Torah classes such as Finkelsztajn had attended were “really nothing at all.” There were only three full-time schools for Jewish studies in the entire country, all three of them in Paris.

Sirat saw it as his mission to stay in France and build the Jewish education system. With few truly Orthodox Ashkenazim, the Salonikans dwindling and only a handful of North Africans, it was a lonely struggle. Then suddenly, he was joined by another 350,000 North African Jews. North African Jewish communities, especially in Algeria, had been tightly organized and extremely activist. Even the departure was well organized and carefully funded to help the poorer Jews. Now France itself needed to be organized. Naouri directed the French rabbinical board, the Beth Din. Created in 1905 to regulate religious law, the Beth Din was chiefly in charge of certifying marriages and supervising kosher practices. Naouri began to enforce strict laws on the slaughter of animals and the regulation of kosher shops.

In 1964, with Paris suddenly experiencing a renaissance of strict observance,