74% of French Jews mulling emigration, poll shows
Jews have no future in France, say more than half of respondents in online survey
Nearly 75 percent of thousands of French Jews who participated in a recent survey said they are considering emigrating.
The survey, whose results were released Monday by the Paris-based Siona organization of Sephardic French Jews, encompassed 3,833 respondents from the Jewish community of France, Siona said.
Of the 74.2 percent of respondents who said they are considering leaving, 29.9 percent cited anti-Semitism. Another 24.4 cited their desire to “preserve their Judaism,” while 12.4 percent said they were attracted by other countries. “Economic considerations” was cited by 7.5 percent of the respondents.
In total, 95.2 percent of all respondents to the online survey conducted by Siona from April 17 to May 16 said they viewed anti-Semitism as “very worrisome” or “worrisome.”
Slightly more than half, or 57.5 percent, of respondents, said “Jews have no future in France,” while 30.6 percent said there is a future for Jews there.
Asked whether they had personally experienced anti-Semitic incidents in the past two years, 14.5 percent replied in the affirmative but of those, only 21.2 filed a complaint with police. Of the complainants, 27.6 percent indicated that their deposition had led to concrete results.
A similar survey from 2012 showed a quarter of Jews who experienced anti-Semitic incidents filed a complaint, Siona noted in a statement, adding, “The results give cause for concern.”
Ninety-three percent said the French state had no efficient means for countering “Islamic exclusionist and pro-Palestinian propaganda,” whereas 93.4 percent said French mass media are partially responsible for France’s anti-Semitism problem. Roughly three-quarters said French Jewish institutions were helpless to stop anti-Semitism.
A similar number of respondents, 76.3 percent, said they were concerned by “the attack on ritual slaughter and circumcision,” compared to 16.9 who said they were not concerned.
In March, thousands of French Jews attended an information fair in Paris about moving to Israel amid an unprecedented spike in immigration to the Jewish state and a wave of anti-Semitic attacks.
According to the Jewish Agency, aliyah to Israel from France saw a dramatic threefold increase in January and February 2014 compared to a year prior. Some 3,280 immigrants from France arrived in Israel in 2013, compared to 1,917 in the previous year.
Earlier in March, the French Jewish community’s watchdog organization, SPCJ, released a report that counted 423 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2013 — a 31 percent decrease from the previous year, but still higher by 8 percent than the number of incidents recorded in 2011.
