Via The Times of Israel:
Seeking justice, brother of Sarah Halimi sees ‘warning’ for French Jews in grisly slaying. In family’s first major interview, William Attal says he can ‘no longer stay silent’ over his sister’s brutal killing by a Muslim neighbor in April, fumes at police refusal to acknowledge it was an anti-Semitic crime.
The killing of French Jew Sarah Halimi and subsequent efforts to deny its anti-Semitic motives represent a turning point for France’s Jewish community and must seen as a “warning sign” of the country’s changing attitudes towards Jews. That is the message William Attal, Halimi’s brother, is seeking to stress to both the French community and to Jews around the world. (...)
“No one can deny that situation has deteriorated for the Jews,” Attal insisted, noting increasing attacks over the past decade which he says have led him to fear for the safety of the Jewish community, and his family.
Attal sees his sister’s case as a further escalation. “First, Jews were attacked at a Jewish school,” he said, referring to the 2011 shooting of a teacher and three children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse. “Then they came into a Jewish supermarket,” he said of the 2015 assault on the Hyper Cacher Kosher supermarket in which four Jews were murdered by radical Islamic terrorists. “Now, with my sister, they have come into a Jewish home, a direct violation of what should be a safe space.”
That fear was at times palpable — both we arranged our interview with Attal, and during the conversation itself.
Wishing to prevent drawing attention to his own home, Attal, a stout man with a short beard and a warm smile, asked to instead meet at a nearby store, but would not agree for photos to be taken at the site for fear of turning it into a target. Minutes into the hour-long conversation, this reporter was asked to remove or cover up his skullcap. Attal, who describes himself as religious, wore a baseball cap to cover his head and said he had forbidden his children from wearing skullcaps in public. (...)
Attal, however, said he could no longer keep quiet. “I didn’t want to talk about it for a long time, but I can no longer remain silent in the face of this lack of justice. I feel like I have no choice but to tell the full story of what happened,” he said, adding that he hoped his sister’s death would act as a “warning sign” to both the French Jewish community and Jews around the world.
Reading from both the police report and the autopsy with his voice cracking and tears in his eyes, Attal shared some of the previously unknown details of the final moments of his sister’s life. As he began to read, two of his children, aged 16 and 20, who had accompanied him to the interview, asked to step away from the table, unable to listen to the harrowing description. (...)
The family will not give up on seeking official recognition of an anti-Semitic motive to the attack, Attal said, but they will soon have to continue their fight from nearly 3,000 miles away, in Israel.
Next month, in a direct response to the murder, both of Halimi’s daughters will be immigrating to Israel, making aliyah with the Jewish Agency, likely as part of an International Fellowship of Christians and Jews program to bring French Jews to the country.
Attal, along with his wife and four children, will be on an IFCJ flight a month after his nieces. (The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews arranged the interview with Attal.)
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, IFCJ president, told the Times of Israel that his organization’s program, which provides new immigrants with financial aid on arrival, is aimed at helping French Jews “suffering from regular aggression and serious violence, from Muslim extremists that live in the suburbs where the Jews live as a besieged minority.” (...)
Attal said he had planned to move to Israel before his sister’s death, but the incident sped up the process and “gave me the absolute certainty, and all of my family, that we need to do this now.”
According to Attal, his sister had also wanted to move to Israel.
“She always dreamed of aliyah and wanted to live next to her son in Israel, but she stayed in France in order to help with her grandchildren,” he said. “Now her children are making aliyah without her and can only visit her grave in Jerusalem.”read more
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