Amid rising angst, French leaders vow to defend country’s Jews

French leaders said Monday that they will defend the Jewish community against attacks, after growing unease and calls from the Israeli leader for a mass immigration.

French President Francois Hollande said Monday he will not allow people to believe that “Jews no longer have a place in Europe” after this weekend’s deadly shooting at a Danish synagogue and the desecration of hundreds of graves at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France.

Jews “have their place in Europe and in particular in France,” Hollande said.

European Jews were already on edge after the killings in January at a kosher market in Paris and a shooting at a Belgian Jewish museum last year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged European Jews to move to Israel after Saturday’s shooting in Copenhagen, echoing a similar call made after the Paris attacks, though some have rebuffed his calls as inappropriate politicking.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls also said Monday that the government would defend French Jews, saying that every person who leaves “is a piece of France that is gone.”

The leaders’ remarks came a day after several hundred tombs in the town of Sarre-Union were defaced at a Jewish cemetery in what the interior minister decried as a “despicable act.

“The country will not tolerate this new injury which goes against the values that all French people share,” said Bernard Cazeneuve, without giving further details of the incident in Sarre-Union.

“Every effort will be made to identify, question and bring to justice the person or persons responsible for this ignominious act,” he added.

Valls, writing on Twitter, also condemned the desecration, calling it “an anti-Semitic and ignoble act.”