2024-02-08 03:10:10
President Emmanuel Macron pays tribute to the 42 French and Franco-Israeli citizens victims of the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, at the Invalides memorial, in Paris, February 7, 2024. LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
The main courtyard of the Invalides in its cloak of mist. The Republican Guard with immaculate gloves. The nagging Kaddish (Jewish prayer for the dead) by Maurice Ravel. The President of the Hieratic Republic as master of ceremonies. And the 42 smiling and sunny photos of the dearly departed, child, uncle, niece, husband, wife… An immense emotion overwhelmed the families of the Franco-Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023 in Israel, when the portraits of the latter, carried by the gendarmes, burst into the heart of this planned ceremonial on Wednesday February 7.
Four months to the day later “the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century”Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the “tortured on October 7”. That day, “the unspeakable has resurfaced from the depths of history”, states the President of the Republic, evoking “savagery” et “barbarism” of this “massive and heinous attack”. The Franco-Israeli victims are part of the lineage of victims of terrorist attacks “from the Bataclan, Nice or Strasbourg”he lists. “Our country has been touched in its flesh” with this attack, he continues, the deadliest since Nice in July 2016. Because if the 42 missing “did not fall under the skies of France” et “were not all born on French soil”, “they were from France”insists the President of the Republic, while the emotion was much less in the country, the day after October 7, than following the terrorist attacks perpetrated in France.
At the head of a country where the number of anti-Semitic acts has quadrupled in 2023, Mr. Macron calls for “don’t give in to rampant anti-Semitism » and “uninhibited”. France, which has the largest Jewish community in Europe (around 500,000 people), is the foreign country which lost the most nationals on October 7, 2023 in Israel. And the first to celebrate them like this. “It’s important for us, we were given a place, it’s a lot of honor”confides Micky Brodash, who lost his daughter Shiraz, moved to see that France “don’t forget any of your children”as the head of state said.
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This former elite police officer in Israel made aliyah (emigration to Israel) at the age of 8 months and speaks French with a Hebrew accent. But he says he is proud to have had a father “engaged for France in the war in Algeria” and a grandfather « partisan » in the Resistance during the Second World War. At Invalides, he was able to discover the plaque which bears witness to the “sacrifice of tens of thousands of Jewish volunteers in 1939-45”.
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