April 9, 2013

(JTA) — The president of France’s umbrella organization of Jewish communities has urged the country’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, to “explain” allegations that he committed plagiarism and used unearned academic titles.

“I expect and we all expect a clear and complete explanation,” Richard Prasquier, president of the CRIF umbrella body, wrote on the organization’s website on Tuesday.

Bernheim last week said his 2011 book “40 Jewish Meditations” contained one passage which Bernheim’s ghost-writer plagiarized without Bernheim’s own knowledge. But he has since been accused of at least three additional cases of plagiarism in the same book and in two earlier publications. It was his last public statement on plagiarism allegations.

But since then French media reported that several of Bernheim’s biographies stated he passed a competitive test in philosophy for civil servants known in France as agregation while there was in fact no record of Bernheim ever passing the test.

Jean-Noel Darde, a senior lecturer at Paris 8 University, wrote on his blog Monday that Bernheim plagiarized another text in his essay against gay marriage, titled “Homosexual Marriage, Gay Parenting and Adoption: What We Forgot to Say.” Eight lines of the essay – which the former pope praised and quoted during a speech at the Vatican in December – were copied “word for word” without credit from a book titled “The Ideology of Gender. Chosen or Transmitted Identity” published seven months before Bernheim’s 50-page essay.

Darde wrote he found another instance of plagiarism in Bernheim’s 2002 book “Caring for Others: At the Foundation of Jewish Law,” which allegedly contains passages lifted from “The Eloquence of Tears,” a book published two years earlier.

Other critics said they found additional plagiarized passages in the book from 2011, including by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Elie Wiesel and Jean-Marie Domenach.

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