Teenage girl’s face slashed in Paris suburb, anti-Semitism suspected

An unknown assailant slashed the face of a 15-year-old girl wearing a Jewish school uniform in Sarcelles.

By: Adina Katz, World Israel News

In what French lawmaker Francois Pupponi called “a heinous anti-Semitic attack,” an unknown assailant slashed the face of a 15-year-old Jewish girl in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles.

As reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Service (JTA), the attack occurred as the victim was walking home from school on Wednesday, wearing the uniform of her private Jewish school. Her mother told French daily Le Parisien that the girl arrived home bleeding and “shocked.”

The victim said she did not see her attacker’s face, explaining that he ran away immediately after the assault.

“I have no doubt the perpetrators of this attack had anti-Semitic motives,” Pupponi wrote in a statement Friday, JTA reported.

“Faced with these acts, we need to abandon pretense and naiveté,” he added. “In Sarcelles, everybody knows who is a practicing Jew according to the way they dress. Delinquents know it too. When someone slashes a young girl’s face with a utility knife, when she is wearing clothes favored by many women from the Jewish community, then there is no room for doubt.”

The day before the assault on the girl, a kosher grocery market in Creteil, a Paris suburb, was vandalized and torched. The latest in a string of attacks against Jews in France, it included anti-Semitic graffiti and was carried out exactly three years after a deadly Islamic terror attack at the Hyper Cacher market in the French capital, which left four Jews dead.

Albert Elharrar, president of the Creteil Jewish community, said Jewish groups believe the shops were deliberately targeted at the time of commemorations for the 2015 attacks.

“There’s a link between the graffiti and the fire,” he told AFP. “It’s clear that they came for no other reason but to attack a kosher shop on the day of the commemorations.”

French Jews, who constitute the largest Jewish community outside of Israel and the United States, continue to leave France, mainly for Israel. Since 2006, 40,000 French Jews have left the Republic.