Three Jews attacked in anti-Semitic incident in southern France

PARIS — The Interior Ministry says an attack by 10 assailants on three people in southeast France was anti-Semitic, and has called for the assailants to be brought to justice. Two of the victims were hospitalized.

The office of Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Sunday that police were mobilized to arrest those behind the attack a night earlier in Villeurbanne, near the city of Lyon.

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The ministry said the assailants wielded a hammer and an iron bar. One victim sustained an open wound to the head, and another suffered a neck injury. Both men wore Jewish skullcaps.

The three were attacked outside the city’s Beit Menachem Jewish school on Saturday night, according to French newspaper L’Express.

The national agency tasked with fighting anti-Semitism said the attackers were likely of North African extraction. The agency said the attackers shouted anti-Semitic insults at the victims before attacking them.

Investigators kept the incident under wraps in the hopes of catching the assailants, according to French newspaper Le Figaro.

Valls condemned the incidents and called it an attack on the Republic of France. He pledged complete police mobilization until the suspects are located.

France is home to western Europe’s largest Jewish community, estimated at about 500,000 people, and has intermittently faced bouts of violent anti-Semitism.

Much of France was shaken in March when a radical Muslim gunman shot dead a rabbi and three Jewish children in southwestern Toulouse.

Then-President Nicholas Sarkozy promised then to crack down on Muslim extremism and anti-Semitic incidents.