France: Jews flock to Montreal to build a new life

When Dan Charbit and his wife, Gaelle Hazan, moved to Montreal from Paris two summers ago, it was meant to be a temporary fix — a year-long attempt for Charbit to reboot his stalled career as a special-effects artist in Quebec’s thriving film and television industry. They agreed to fly home if the experiment failed.

 Fourteen months after arriving in Canada, the couple has no desire to return to France. The 43-year-old Charbit, who won an Emmy earlier this year for work on the fourth season of the hit HBO show “Game of Thrones,” started a new job last month as a supervisor at Mokko, a Montreal-based special-effects studio serving the film and television industries. Hazan, 39, has found employment as a construction project manager.

Charbit and Hazan are part of a new wave of French Jews who have resettled in French-speaking Quebec, fleeing France’s dismal unemployment rate, which hit 10.5 percent in September, as well as the shock of anti-Semitism that has reverberated throughout the country in recent months and crested over the summer during waves of anti-Israel demonstrations.

France’s Jewish Community Protection Service reported 527 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2014, compared with 276 in the same period last year. In recent months — and especially in the wake of the most recent Gaza war — there have been incidents of Jews being harassed, even physically assaulted, in the streets, and synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and restaurants being torched. And notably, in 2012, four people, including three children, were killed during a shooting rampage at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

While Israel remains the destination of choice — 5,063 French Jews made aliyah between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel, the most from any European country — Quebec, and its largest city of Montreal in particular, is quietly becoming a popular alternative for émigrés.

“I hear and I know of young couples moving to Quebec,” said Serge Cwajgenbaum, the Lyon, France-born secretary general of the European Jewish Congress. “The reason is not necessarily related to the rise of anti-Semitism, but it’s more to find a proper future, in terms of good work, good salaries and a cheaper way of life.” There are some 90,000 Jews in the Montreal metropolitan area.  [...]

Monique Lapointe, director of Agence Ometz, Montreal’s primary Jewish social services and resettlement organization, told JTA she has noticed a significant increase in newcomers, especially over the past year. Inquiries, Lapointe said, have poured in through Ometz’s email system and Facebook page — including from French Jews currently living in Israel.  “I wouldn’t say it’s a huge number of [immigrants],” Lapointe said. “But it’s a trend. We’ll be anticipating more.” Lapointe described the average immigrant as single, between the ages of 25 and 35, “very well educated and looking for a new kind of life.”

The wider Montreal Jewish community, Lapointe said, is now in the early stages of crafting a coordinated approach to handle the inflow. Thus far, it has been difficult to track newcomers, she added, partly because French Jews keep looser ties to Jewish community organizations than do their North American counterparts. “In France, people don’t talk about Jewishness,” Lapointe said. “They’re not used to community organizations. Some will never come to see us. They don’t have this reflex.” [...]

Families with children also reported a fear of anti-Semitism, and anxieties about their ability to practice Judaism safely amid a rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks.

For Julie Weill, a 31-year-old mother of three, the decision to leave her home in Strasbourg five years ago was prompted by the increasing sense of unease she and her husband, Nathanael, felt as Jews in France. While the modern Orthodox couple was never victimized by anti-Semitism, they heard stories from friends and family, and it was considered dangerous, Weill said, to walk around downtown Strasbourg wearing a yarmulke. [...] Weill still finds it difficult to let her two boys, who attend a Sephardic Jewish day school, wear yarmulkes in public, an old habit from the family’s life in Strasbourg. But the concern, she acknowledged, is largely “irrational.”

Charbit and Hazan, both non-observant, have also felt a difference in Quebec society treats its Jewish community. “In France, you don’t put your mezuzah outside,” Charbit said. “Jewish life in Montreal is safer.”

More: JTA/Jewish Daily Forward. H/T anti-semitism.net