Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  ALL THESE REASONS and more drew Shimon Samuels to Sammy Ghozlan. Samuels knew Ghozlan by reputation; he had been recruited during François Mitterrand’s administration to help investigate the 1982 bombing at Jo Goldenberg’s, a famous Jewish restaurant in the Marais district of Paris, and he had been the subject of a lengthy article in Le Matin magazine. The film director Alexandre Arcady had used the character of a Sephardic cop named Sammy in a Nazi-art-caper movie called K, based on a detective novel, but Samuels had never seen it or heard of the book. He knew of Ghozlan mainly through the flyers for his “grand orchestre de variétés” and the cards distributed at Bar Mitzvahs which showed Sammy posed behind drums in a tuxedo with his band, with “Groove, Funck, Hassidiques, Israélien . . . Oriental” written in bold yellow letters at the top. When the two men met at the CRIF dinner, Samuels mentioned his midlife attempt to learn to play the clarinet. “Ghozlan reminded me of a Pancho Villa type, very uncharacteristic of French Jews,” Samuels later said. “He had no pretense of being an intellectual.” Ghozlan told Samuels he had been incensed that the Jewish leadership had fought him when he took on the claimants’ case against French banks. Samuels understood immediately that Ghozlan could be a useful ally. “He had come with the police background and was trying to do—with no real help!—exactly what we were doing, analyze documents, work his sources. . . . I thought the Jewish organizations had missed out on an effective intelligence operation in the banlieues.” It would take months, however, for Samuels, forever circling the globe, to be able to forge an official relationship with the cop from the suburbs.

  By the winter of 2001, the situation had become untenable. The attack on the World Trade Center appeared to set off a fresh wave of violence. More and more, in the late afternoon, Monique Ghozlan would find her husband at the consistoire, which regulated synagogues and all aspects of Jewish life, giving interns and volunteers recommendations on how to take calls from attack victims.

  Monique and Sammy live in a stone house behind a hedge, within walking distance of their small synagogue. The house is decorated with a collection of North African silver they brought from Algeria and family portraits, including one of Sammy’s grandfather, who was once the chief rabbi of Algeria. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ghozlans were orchardists who had large properties in the country. Monique, whom Sammy met when he was in the Boy Scouts, has pineapple-blond hair and a perpetual tan. The daughter of a bar owner and the mother of three grown daughters and one son, she resembles the actress Dyan Cannon, with hair that cascades to her shoulders. As Sammy worked the phones in the late afternoon, Monique, home from her job teaching first grade, would cook couscous, fava beans, and fish—traditional Sephardic foods.

  The Sephardim have a hermetic culture with entirely different rituals from those of Ashkenazi Jews. Considered by many to be more religious than their Eastern European counterparts, France’s Sephardim never experienced massive pogroms or, for that matter, Europe’s secular enlightenment; Spinoza was Sephardic, but there was no Sephardic Freud or Marx. Revered as “the muscle Jews” by the early Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, the Sephardim were thought to be free of the victim complexes of Eastern Europeans. “We are not always as educated, and we like to drink and have big parties, but we are not depressives,” Sammy told me. In the small shuls on the outskirts, there is chaos during the service, with children running from family to family and men gossiping through the chanting of the Torah as if they were conducting business in a bazaar. Sephardic families are often large, and first cousins are permitted to marry. Since the Algerian war drove them to France in the 1960s, Sephardim can now be found at every level of education and accomplishment in French society—Nobel laureates, government ministers, distinguished intellectuals—and many of them have intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. According to a recent survey, 70 percent of the Jews in France are Sephardic.

  STILL, IT DID NOT take much to make Ghozlan see himself as an outsider, misunderstood by the French elite. He had a title, security adviser, which sounded impressive, but he had no office and no private phone. A special green telephone had been installed at the consistoire, and all calls received by volunteers were reported to Ghozlan. “I tried to bring the techniques of simple police interrogation,” he said. “Ask the name, the address, the phone number, the place of the attack.” He was often understandably frustrated. The idea that by the winter of 2001 this jerry-built detective agency was monitoring more than 200 incidents throughout France was shocking to Ghozlan. A rabbi had been beaten up, urine had been thrown at Jewish students on a playground, and fires had been set, yet few of the incidents were reported immediately to the police. It was detective work at its most primitive, on scraps of paper. Failure was unthinkable to Ghozlan, however, and he knew how to deal with the French bureaucracy. But lobbying through ethnic organizations was frowned upon in France and was considered an act with vulgar American overtones. The officials of many Jewish organizations were averse to such aggressive tactics.

  At home Ghozlan had a large-screen television for his ninety-two-year-old mother, who lived with him. Ghozlan and his mother never missed an episode of NYPD Blue, dubbed into French, and it galled him that he was forced to operate without support or equipment of any kind. He looked for a storefront to use as a base for his operation, but he knew that that too would be primitive—two rooms tucked in the back of a Jewish center in an out-of-the-way arrondissement. On Fridays after his broadcast, he would drive to Rue Broca to check on his volunteers, only to find the interns had missed a call or were on an extended lunch break, indicating that they were oblivious to the seriousness of what seemed to them minor incidents. He began to seethe at the injustice and remembered every remark that seemed to diminish his work. One official told him, “There is no anti-Semitism unless someone dies.”

  Shortly after David de Rothschild made his remarks to the Jerusalem Post, Ghozlan’s cell phone rang. When he learned that Rothschild had said there was no significant anti-Semitism in France and that neo-Nazis were most likely responsible for the attacks, Ghozlan erupted. “It was clear to me that Rothschild and the Ashkenazi Jews would never understand our situation. I wanted to start a Jewish security force,” he told me.

  As Jean-Marie Le Pen mounted his campaign in 2002, the tally of anti-Semitic attacks had risen to more than 350. The official line of the government continued to be “There is no anti-Semitism.” “How can they say this with a straight face?” the reporter Christopher Caldwell would later demand in The Weekly Standard.

  YOU GET TO THE HOUSE of Samuel Pisar, who is a survivor of Auschwitz, through an elaborate private entrance on the Square Foch. A grander address does not exist in Paris. Pisar made his fortune as an international lawyer; he was one of the last people to speak to the troubled media mogul Robert Maxwell before he went over the side of his yacht. He lives surrounded by Rothkos in a house of flawless modernity. Presidents Chirac and Mitterrand have often invited him to speak publicly on Jewish matters. As the attacks on Jews mounted, Pisar began to send frequent E-mails to Abraham Foxman in New York, reporting the endless debates raging privately in elite circles. Foxman had one word of advice: Mobilize. It was therefore up to Pisar to help galvanize a paralyzed French establishment that could equivocate with dexterity, extending arguments for months. In the period following the attack on the World Trade Center, Frenchmen began to speak of “la benladenisation des banlieues.” They also noted that terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, awaiting trial for his part in the 9/11 attacks, was a product of the banlieues, as were various terrorists arrested for attacks that had taken place from Strasbourg to Béziers, on the Belgian border.

  Roger Cukierman often made his way to Square Foch to engage in lengthy discussions. Of all the Jewish officials in Paris, Cukierman, the head of CRIF, had the sharpest insights into the anti-Semitic problem, but he was cautious by nature. A former chairman of the Rothschild bank in Paris, he is often in Israel, where his son runs an investment house. Cukierman put the highest premiu
m on respectability and did not want to be considered pro-Zionist. All that winter of 2002, behind closed doors within the elite Jewish community, a fierce struggle was going on.

  “I urged Cukierman to go to the United States and see the great Jewish organizations,” Pisar told me. “I wanted him to meet Abe Foxman, and the Bronfmans [founders of Seagram and patrons of many Jewish organizations], and I wanted him to learn how the American Jewish organizations handle these things.” Pisar knew that Cukierman, despite his prestige in France, had never been totally free of worry as to how he was perceived. “After the Holocaust, European Jews carried with them the syndromes of the ghettos,” Pisar said. “There were many Jews here who said, ‘We have to do something,’ but others said, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ In America they don’t speak that way. No one says, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ ” “I was very impressed by what I saw at the ADL,” Cukierman told me. He had been in New York on many occasions, but the size and scope of the operation startled him. For starters, there was the outward symbol of the ADL’s gray brick office building in the United Nations Plaza. Foxman’s worldwide staff of intelligence agents shared information with the government, turned out press releases, put pressure on Congress, and had access to the leading editorial pages across the country. Cukierman and the group with him from Paris suddenly realized that Americans who happened to be Jewish felt wholly comfortable in their country and their communities. “When I got back,” Cukierman said, “the first thing I did was to almost triple the budget of CRIF.”

  In February 2002, Cukierman submitted a searing and prophetic editorial to Le Monde, in the form of an open letter to President Jacques Chirac:

  The leaders of the country like to play down anti-Jewish acts. They prefer to see these as ordinary violence. We are deluged with statistics designed to show that an attack against a synagogue is an act of violence and not antiSemitism. Some Jews who have lost touch with reality like to buttress their personal status by turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to danger, in order to curry favor with the public consensus. . . . Judicial authorities don’t like to mete out strong punishment for acts of anti-Jewish violence, even when the perpetrators are caught red-handed: a three-month suspended sentence or nothing for an attack on a Jewish place of worship, compared to a year for burning a straw cottage in Corsica.

  Why this laxness? Because this violence, perpetrated by only one side, is linked to the conflict in the Middle East. Because too often Jew and Israeli mean the same thing. . . . Because the Muslim population is all-important. . . . Once again, we are the scapegoat. It’s a part we no longer are prepared to play.

  All over Paris, there was suddenly a flurry of activity— Shimon Samuels called it a derby race—as groups began to mobilize. As the election in which Le Pen was running neared its end, 200,000 protesters marched in the streets of Paris. The American Jewish Congress called for a boycott of the Cannes Film Festival. But the menace continued. Three men who burned a synagogue in Montpellier—identified as “Morad,” “Jamel,” and “Hakim”—were described by the prosecutor not as anti-Semites but as being “like a lot of petty delinquents, animated by a spirit of revenge, who try to ennoble their excesses by using a political discourse.” Around the time Cukierman’s editorial was published, individuals who broke into a synagogue in Créteil were given a three-month suspended sentence.

  THERE ARE 130,000 police officers in France, according to Christopher Caldwell, but the police union is so strong that less than half of the force is assigned the beat, and only 10,000 are available for duty at any given time. Law-enforcement officials refer to the worst areas of the banlieues as “zones de non-droit” (lawless areas) and often refuse to go there. Even when police make arrests, according to Caldwell, liberal judges frequently let the criminals go, and 37 percent of the sentences are not carried out.

  Victims are reluctant to be interviewed. You hear stories of people who named their attackers to the police and were later beaten up. It took me days to arrange to see a father whose two daughters were attacked in their school in central Paris. A well-known gerontologist, he insisted that I not use his name. I met him at his medical center, not far from the Marais. “My daughters were thirteen and fifteen and were surrounded by a group of students at school. A group of boys knocked them to the ground, covered them with food, and shouted, ‘Dirty Jews.’ What happened next was this: The attackers and other students threatened to kill the girls if they said anything, and for days my daughters received death threats.” Two of the attackers were expelled, only to be reassigned to a school a short distance away, but the family kept receiving threats. At the end of the school year they moved to another arrondissement. “I could not put my daughters in any more danger,” he said. “They completely changed. They had been close to so many diverse people in their school, and now they have pulled within themselves and just want to be with other Jewish students.”

  A history teacher named Barbara Lefebvre called Ghozlan’s hot line when a student at her school insulted her. “I did not know where to turn,” she told me. “I knew that no one in the school would address my concerns.” One of the students had called her “a dirty Jew.” “I went to one of the heads of the school and told her I was insulted as a teacher, a woman, a Jew, and a civil servant. I asked her to report it to the authorities, as I had done. She said, ‘I do not have that power.’ ” Like the gerontologist, Lefebvre was concerned about reprisals and asked me not to identify her school. “Most of the school officials will say to the teachers, ‘Don’t talk about it.’ It is to protect their reputation. Every pupil has a notebook with his picture in it. Many of the kids took their pictures off and put on the face of bin Laden. . . . And nobody said anything until a teacher saw it. They are afraid. But afraid of what? For those of us who have stepped forward, I say, we are not courageous. It is a duty.”

  Lefebvre told her story on the Jewish radio station and was contacted by another teacher, who used the pseudonym Emmanuel Brenner. A professor of history, Brenner developed a tutorial for teachers on how to teach World War II. “The problem of violence was so intense,” he told me, “that I asked several of the teachers to compile their stories.” He had collected them in a book called Les Territoires Perdus de la République (The Lost Territories of the Republic). L’Express had published an extract, but, Brenner told me, it was months before the book was mentioned by French television and Le Monde.

  Only three of the seven teachers who contributed to the book used their own names. One, Iannis Roder, arrived at my hotel after school one day. “In my class, the students will not obey a woman,” he said. “One child yelled at a woman whose name was Rabin, ‘Jew! Jew!’ I live with these children during the day, and when I tell my family about it, they are frightened. But when I talk to some journalists, they say, ‘That can’t be true.’ ” Roder said one reporter told him, “You are only seeing anti-Semitism because you are a Jew.”

  DRIVING TO TRAPPES, near Versailles, you pass housing projects where unemployed Muslims live. The small shul in town is down the block from one. Here, in October 2000, the synagogue was destroyed, and it is only slowly being rebuilt. There are black smoke marks all over the roof. “Arrests were made,” the head of the Jewish community tells me. “Many people were questioned.” But there was no prosecution. Later I visit the office of Ariel Goldmann, a criminal lawyer who has boxes of files concerning the incident. The authorities suggested that someone may have accidentally put a cigarette into a trash can, he says, shaking his head in disgust. Goldmann’s father was the chief rabbi of Paris in the 1980s, and Goldmann often works on such cases pro bono. They are, he says, inevitably the same. Several blocks from Goldmann’s office, I visit the lawyer William Goldnadel, whose clients include the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. “Who do you think was responsible for the pogroms in the Germany of the 1930s?” he asks. “Piano teachers? Professors? It is always the hooligans who are at the center of the violence.”

  Next I go to see Shmuel Trigano, the author of
twelve books and part of a circle of influential thinkers that includes the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the writer Michel Gurfinkel, and the philosopher and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy. “I was outraged by what was going on here,” he tells me, “and I began to keep a detailed list of all the attacks to publish in a new quarterly, which would document—in ways the French press was not doing—what was going on.”

  Trigano was not alone in his efforts to tabulate the attacks. Dismayed by the pro-Palestinian bias in the French press, Elisabeth Schemla, a former managing editor of L’Express, hired a team of journalists and set up a Web site, Proche-Orient.info, to ensure objective reporting on the Middle East. The site, like the Jewish radio, has become mandatory for understanding the situation in France. The day I went to see Schemla, her deputy editor, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, used the term “tour de passepasse” (three-card monte) to explain the shuffles and contradictions involved in obtaining accurate information in France. CRIF and another group, S.O.S. Racisme, created by a moderate French Muslim group and a French Jewish student organization, were also investigating, and their efforts eventually galvanized the establishment. At the CRIF dinner in 2001, Roger Cukierman confronted the prime minister, telling him, he recalled, “ ‘We are under attack as French citizens, and it is unacceptable.’ That night I gave a list of more than 300 documented attacks to every one of the 700 guests.” Cukierman was enraged by the French bureaucracy: according to police records, there were a mere 180 attacks.