Hollande tells Jewish leaders: Jewish schools and synagogues will be protected

Marcy Oster

(JTA) — French President Francois Hollande promised at a meeting with French Jewish leaders that Jewish schools and synagogues will be protected.

“He told us that all the schools, all the synagogues will be protected, if necessary, on top of the police, by the army,” Roger Cukierman, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, or CRIF, said Sunday morning after a meeting with Hollande at the Elysee palace.

“We’re wounded, we’re angry. We think substantial, urgent, and serious measures need to be taken,” Cukierman told reporters before the meeting.

Hollande also said he would visit the Grand Synagogue of Paris after Sunday’s solidarity march, to mark the terror attacks in France last week.

In a national address Friday evening following the hostage crisis at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket and at a print shop north of Paris which led to the death of brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo attack, called incident at the supermarket a “dreadful anti-Semitic attack.”

The U.S. State Department also labeled the attack as anti-Semitic.

“We condemn in the strongest terms ‎yesterday’s cowardly anti-Semitic assault against the innocent people in the kosher supermarket,” Chanan Weissman, a spokesman for the State Department, told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday.

Amedy Coulibaly, a 32-year-old Islamist who was part of the cell of brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo attack on Jan. 7, told a Paris television station during the hostage crisis that he attacked the supermarket because he wanted to target Jews.