France to deploy soldiers to protect Jewish schools

Marcy Oster

(JTA) — France will increase security at Jewish institutions, including Jewish schools, with soldiers, the country’s interior minister said.

Nearly 5,000 security forces and police will be deployed to protect the country’s 700 Jewish schools, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuves said Monday during a meeting with parents at a Jewish school south of Paris near the site of last week’s deadly attack on a kosher supermarket, the French news agency AFP reported.

The promise of more protection came a day after French President François Hollande said in a meeting with French Jewish leaders in the wake of the attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket that the country would move to protect synagogues and Jewish schools, including using the military.

Also Monday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that Paris kosher supermarket gunman Amedy Coulibaly likely had an accomplice and asserted that “the hunt will go on.”