Paris mayor slammed for respecting Yom Kippur

(JTA) — The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has come under criticism for adjourning city council talks early for the start of Yom Kippur.

Following the early suspension of deliberations at the Council of Paris on Tuesday, council member Gilles Alayrac said, “The mayor devotes too much attention to religious sensitivities.”

The newspaper Le Parisien also quoted Alayrac, a representative of the Radical Party of the Left, as saying that “only the Republican calendar matters.”

Alexis Corbière, another representative of the Radical Party of the Left said, “The real problem is public spending on religious venues.”

They and other members of their party have expressed opposition in the past to subsidies given to approximately 20 Jewish kindergartens in Paris.

“My friend Gilles panics when he is required to be attentive to others,” Delanoë, who is not Jewish, told the French newspaper. “If we had scheduled a meeting for December 24, he would protest.”

In 2011, Alayrac said organizers of a song festival featuring all French classics should not have been allowed to hold the event because “under the guise of defending French traditions, their objective is to directly attack Islam.”

The council was scheduled to hold discussions through Tuesday and Wednesday, until Mayor Delanoë of the Socialist Party rescheduled the planned deliberations to take place next month.