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Jewish World: Beware, La Sï¿½curitï¿½
Nicholas Simon Paris

Anxious about ongoing fallout from Iraq, French Jewry publicizes a security hotline for anti-Semitic alerts -- and defense

For years, French Jews have vaguely referred to the young Jewish men and women with small speakers in their ears who talked into their sleeves and searched bags at community events as "la sï¿½curitï¿½" (security). They have been particularly noticeable over the last two years, as delinquent Arab teens conducted a sporadic campaign of violence against Jews in protest against Israelï¿½s counter terror actions and suppression of the Palestinian intifada.

But the war in Iraq gave "la sï¿½curitï¿½ " a name: "Service de Protection de la Communautï¿½ Juive" (Jewish Community Protection Service). French Jewish leaders, fearing the Iraqi conflict would trigger new anti-Jewish violence, have launched a stream of ads on Jewish radio stations announcing a toll-free telephone number (0800-18-26-26) that could be called 24 hours a day to report anti-Semitic incidents and receive advice on --protection and legal recourse. The phone number, callers are told, was SPCJï¿½s -- a group that, it transpires, has been working behind the scenes for over two decades.

In his upmarket legal office off the Champs Elysï¿½es, SPCJ spokesman, lawyer Ariel Goldmann, is smiling, but he quickly makes clear that the new openness has strict limits. The identity of the SPCJï¿½s operations chief, for one, remains secret. "All I can say is that heï¿½s under 40 and has been involved in the SPCJ throughout his adult life," says Goldmann, son of popular, former Orthodox Paris chief rabbi Alain Goldmann. Training and equipment are also banned subjects. "But we do not have firearms -- those are only for the police, with whom we work closely," he volunteers.

One other piece of information Goldmann does reveal is that the president of the SPCJï¿½s executive bureau, which oversees its annual budget of several million dollars, is Eric de Roths-child. The elegant Roths-child, 62, of the international banking dynasty, doesnï¿½t frisk people outside synagogues, but he has held the administrative post, one of many volunteer positions his family occupies in the community, since the SPCJï¿½s creation. "We decided to go public about our existence because we were expecting trouble and wanted the community to be prepared," Goldmann says.

The SPCG was founded after four pedestrians, including an Israeli woman tourist, were killed by a booby-trapped motorcycle outside a Paris synagogue in October 1980. Their services have evolved into maintaining high-profile protection at and around major community events, none of which has yet been disrupted by troublemakers. It is widely presumed that training is heavily angled on detecting explosives (police sappers do the defusing if any are found), and such unarmed combat techniques as Israelï¿½s home-bred Krav Maga.

Since hostilities in Iraq erupted in March, the anticipated trouble has in fact emerged, though in small doses and the SPCJ has not been involved. Goldmann lists 17 minor incidents in the first three weeks of the war. The most serious came on March 22: Several dozen keffiya-wearing Arab youths peeled off from an anti-war demonstration in Paris to beat up two members of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth group. The two Jews, one of whom was wearing a kippah, were spotted when they walked up to watch the rally. Anti-war groups pledged to weed out anti-Semitic elements in future demonstrations; and tough Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a Jewish grandfather and is enormously popular among French Jews, met with the victims of the attack and vowed to punish the perpetrators. Paris police chief Jean-Paul Proust told the Jewish weekly Actualitï¿½s Juives that 500 policemen were now on permanent duty protecting Jewish premises in Paris.

Roger Cukierman, president of CRIF, the roof body for French Jewish groups, was satisfied with government moves. He noted, however, that not a single arrest had yet been made in connection with the most recent incidents. The main problem, he says, is that anti-Semitic attacks are usually spontaneous acts by groups of unorganized Arab juvenile delinquents difficult to track down if not caught in the act.

The SPCJ, does not intervene in street demonstrations, which is the policeï¿½s turf, limiting its activities to around and inside community premises. It also advises on improving static protection (lights, closed-circuit cameras, gates, etc.).

The SPCJ is organized in layers, Goldmann explains. An inner circle is made up of dozens ("less than 100") of full-time, paid personnel. The SPCJï¿½s budget is footed both by Jewish community organizations and by non-Jewish local public authorities, whose own budgets allow them to pay for such items as improved security installations for schools, public or not.

It works with hundreds of well-trained, unpaid volunteers in their 20s, who each donate at least a day a week to SPCJ activities, standing in the cold outside synagogues monitoring who goes in or poking into public garbage bins at Jewish events. ("Itï¿½s their mitzvah," Goldmann says). Beyond is a pool of several thousand volunteers who lend a hand more occasionally, usually for the High Holidays and other occasions when there are large gatherings of Jews requiring more surveillance personnel.

Jean Cohen, 51, a real estate agent, is in charge of security at his synagogue in west-central Paris. The security detail comes under the joint authority of the SPCJ and the synagogue. "Iï¿½ll tell you everything I am allowed to tell you," he says, "but Iï¿½d prefer not to identify which synagogue weï¿½re talking about. You never know who will get which ideas from reading what."

Cohenï¿½s most active time of the year is the High Holidays, when he directs 60 to 80 volunteers from his community, 20 percent of them women, who work together with police and a handful of SPCJ permanent members to protect the 2,000-seat hall where services are held. The security detail then uses airport-like metal-detectors, he says, "but the main thing is that we are very visible. Deterrence works when potential troublemakers stay away because they see there are just too many human obstacles in their way. Someone has to do this job. Of course, it means you rarely get to pray. But I have an arrangement with my rabbi -- he agrees that he does the praying for both of us."

Praying may not help when youï¿½ve got to make major repairs on your car, though. The SPCJ is especially alert to suspicious vehicles. "We donï¿½t hesitate to call the police bomb squad when a car is illegally parked on a sidewalk outside a Jewish community building and has the telltale signs of a possible booby-trapped vehicle," says one member. "If the police agree with us, they often blast open the car door. It doesnï¿½t destroy the vehicle, but it doesnï¿½t do it much good either. As you can imagine, some of the owners, whose jaws drop when they find their damaged cars afterwards, are inevitably Jews. They often turn out to have been in the building."

May 5, 2003

Jewish World