France: Jews leave France in record numbers (CNN)

CNN reports (click on link to watch the video):

Yoav Krief remembers the day he knew it was time to move to Israel: January 9, 2015.It was a Friday. Four Jews had just been killed in the Hyper Cacher, a kosher supermarket in Paris, two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack. One of them was Krief's friend. 

"I was not good, really not good," Krief says of how he felt at the time. "I talked to my mom, and I said, 'We must go to Israel. We need to go to Israel.'"

Krief decided to leave France after a friend was killed in a terror attack. Krief, a French Jew who had just finished high school, moved to Israel with his family six months later, as part of the largest migration of Jews from Western Europe to Israel since the modern state of Israel was created.

Nearly 8,000 French Jews moved to Israel in the year following the Charlie Hebdo attack, according to the Jewish Agency, which handles Jewish immigration, or aliyah, to Israel. 

[...]

'Difficult to live as a Jew in France'

Many French Jews settle in Ashdod, a city in southern Israel known for its large French population. You are as likely to hear French on the streets as you are Hebrew, especially in one of the city's many French cafés. 

"It's great for me here, much better than France," says Charly Dahan, a musician who moved to Israel from Paris two years ago.   Dahan sits in Café Lyon, a popular meeting spot for French Jews.

"This is the first time in my life that I am relaxed. In France, I also felt good, but the situation and the current problems... it's very difficult to live as a Jew in France," he adds.  [...]

Fear of being seen as Jewish

But when the European Union studied the prevalence of anti-Semitism in 2013, it found that 74% of Jews in France avoid openly identifying themselves as Jewish at least some of the time, and more than a quarter of French Jews always do.

Dov Cohen, a French Jew who left Marseille for Ashdod last summer, says he never wore his religious skullcap, or kippa, in public.

"You have to watch out," Cohen says about his life in France. "You have to protect the children because of fights in the metro and on the buses. This pushed us to decide to make aliyah," he says. 

"Here there is a feeling of security that no longer exists in France. Twenty years ago, maybe yes. But since the year 2000, there no longer is that feeling of security in France."

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