Exodus Redux

"This is a Jewish community that has western liberal values that are consistent with our Canadian values. This is a Jewish community that is filled with professionals, people of achievement in law, in business, medicine, sciences and the arts. This is a vibrant, dynamic community that could make a contribution to our country, and this is a community that speaks French, which is something that is very attractive for the Quebec government."
"[In Paris] I found fear. Parents were telling me how terrified they were to send their children to school."
"I think Quebec should proactively be looking to welcome Jews from France who are looking to leave."
Adam Scheier, senior rabbi, Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, Montreal

"There are not a lot of countries where you die because you are Jewish, but it happens in France. We preferred leaving before things got worse."
"There is a physical threat, but what is even more terrible -- because in the end, there is little chance of dying -- is to be assaulted in daily life. My father, who lives in southern France, faces verbal and physical abuse when he leaves synagogue. That sort of thing happens every day."
"I tell them [17 and 25, son and daughter] to be careful. In the metro [in Paris] don't show your Star of David. Don't display any distinctive symbol showing you are Jewish. They no longer understand, being here [in Montreal] they have no problem, they feel safe."
"Canada is peaceful and they do not at all feel threatened as Jews. We have to teach them when they go to France how to behave as threatened Jews."
Frederic Saadoun, 46, French-Jewish immigrant to Canada

"Today, anti-Semitic threats in France include persistent bias, sectarian stereotypes, deep hatred, but especially anti-Semitic jihadist terror."
"Men and young children are killed for the sole reason that they are Jewish."
Report compiled by the Jewish Community Security Service and France's Interior Ministry

A French soldier patrols in the Jewish quarter of the Marais district, Paris, January 12, 2015. (Photo credit: AFP/Bertrand Guay)

"We are trying everything to keep people here, but we have a lot of difficulty because there are troubling signals in the short and long term. We have a school that cannot manage to rent a space because people do not want a Jewish school in the building, because it becomes a target for terrorists."
"People are nice, they understand, but in reality there are problems. We are not very welcome. Nobody is saying they want to put us in trains again. It's not that. But we pose a problem. We pose a problem currently."
Serge Benhaim, president, Paris synagogue

Mr. Benhaim's synagogue was attacked last summer by French participants in a protest, an anti-Israel march that turned ugly and violent. These are the things that are happening in France. They have been occurring with sad regularity for a decade and more, and attacks are on the increase. The report compiled by the country's Interior Ministry along with the Jewish Community Security Service revealed that anti-Semitic acts doubled in 2014 over the previous year.

There were 851 incidents of anti-Semitism and of the total 241 fell into the classification of violent acts, the remainder threats.

France has the largest Jewish population in Europe, at a half-million. They comprise one percent of the population but became targets of 51 percent of all racist acts in 2014, according to the report. The government has announced a new program to combat "racism and anti-Semitism" over the following three year period. Changes are to provide for stiffer hate speech penalties. For many it is too little, far too late.

For the half-million Jews to whom France has been home for a thousand years, the presence of millions of Muslims whom France has opened its doors to has brought the death-knell of Jewish presence in their French homes with the rise of Islamist hatred for Jews and the violence it has brought to the fore. The story is the same elsewhere in Europe, from Sweden to Norway, Britain to Holland; wherever an accumulation of Muslims has resulted, vile and violent acts of anti-Semitism have arisen.

Richard Prasquier, former president of France's major Jewish organization is clear on the situation: "We are democrats, but we know that democracy today does not have the proper tools to confront the rise of Islamist radicals and anti-Semitism. We have trouble combating it." And so, young French Jews in particular, looking to protect their  young families from constant vicious harassment and the fear of violence, are leaving the country of their birth.

JIM HOLLANDER / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Mourners carry placards as they gather at a cemetery in Jerusalem on January 13, 2015 during the funeral of four Jews killed in an Islamist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris last week. According to Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, Canada and the U.S. should open their immigration channels to Jews leaving France.

Some leave for Israel, which is eager to welcome them. And others look to countries like Canada and the United States to give them haven from racist attacks, and in return they offer the countries their gratitude, their loyalty, their skills and their ability to merge with the larger society that welcomes them. Some seven thousand French Jews left to become Israeli citizens last year, doubling the number of the year before.

An estimated three to five thousand have left for haven elsewhere, many of them applying for emigration to Canada, a country known for its inclusiveness, its protection of minorities, its equality provisions under the law. And Canada has become a beneficiary, even as French Jews have found a new home for themselves and their children.