A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Altmanns —Daniel and Lynda—were not working-class people, and they could afford to live in the Marais, buying a large, two-floor apartment with a terrace a few minutes away from the synagogue. There was enough space to comfortably raise a large family. But most of the fifty families that belonged to Rottenberg's community were not wealthy international businessmen and had to find apartments ever farther away. Many had to walk forty min-ules or an hour to attend Sabbath services on Rue Pavee.

  The Pletzl, too, was being shaved away. It was now no more than Rue des Rosiers, Rue des Ecouffes, and Rue Pavee. It was becoming a curiosity for tourists, mentioned in guidebooks. You could buy a little pastry at Finkelsztajn's or some Sephardic treats from the Journos”. Or you could have lunch at Jo Goldenberg's, which had been one of the last surviving steamy one-room eateries in the Pletzl but was now expanded and cleaned up for foreign visitors.

  Like many of the old Pletzl generation, Icchok Finkelsztajn had left for a better neighborhood before the renovation had gotten under way. It was this migration of the old working class that had opened up much of the property to renovation. In 1971, Icchok retired, and he and Dwojra moved to the north of the city behind Montmartre, where for a reasonable price they could rent a more spacious apartment in a nineteenth-century building that was not collapsing. In 1974, Leah Korcarz died, and the blue-tiled bakery on the corner of Rue des Ecouffes was sold out of the Finkelsztajn family. Henri, who had taken over his father's bakery, was the only family member still in the Pletzl, although he and his wife also now lived away from the crowded center. The apartment above the bakery could be used as an additional work space, making it possible to expand the offerings of foods to keep pace with the Journos across the street.

  DURING THE 1970s, France experienced a fashion called “forties revival/’ Once De Gaulle and his official version of World War II faded from power, there was a great burst of interest in what had taken place in France during the war. Books were being written and movies produced. Film director Marcel Ophuls made The Sorrow and the Piry, a television documentary on daily life during the war in the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. The soon-to-be president of France, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, happened to be from that region, and his family happened to be among many that the film showed in various degrees of collaboration and acquiescence. While the film was a sensation in New York, it never made it on to French television, which was state-controlled, until a decade later, when Giscard was defeated by Francois Mitterrand.

  The more French people looked into the 1940s, the more toxic the atmosphere became. In 1978 a journalist for UExpress went to Spain to interview Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the one-time head of Vichy's Office for Jewish Affairs. Darquier told UExpress that “only lice were gassed at Auschwitz.” He then proceeded to deny that there had been a Holocaust. This was the same year that, while the Institute for Historical Review was coming into being in California, a crackpot professor in Lyons named Robert Faurisson started attracting attention by making outrageous statements. He was to become one of the most publicized of the Holocaust revisionists.

  There were more serious problems than this in daily life. Attacks against both immigrants and Jews were becoming increasingly common. In 1975 there was an explosion in a synagogue near Rue Bleue. The following year, several organizations that monitored anti-Semitism were attacked. In 1977 anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish sites noticeably increased, and several leaders were attacked. The rhythm of these attacks seemed to accelerate. In 1979 a Molo-tov cocktail was thrown at a synagogue, and a Jewish leftist, Pierre Goldman, was openly assassinated. In March a bomb went off in a Paris student's kosher restaurant at lunchtime, wounding dozens. The next month a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the door of a Jewish hostel. In September one of the Paris stores of Daniel Hechter, a Jewish clothing designer, was bombed. In November firebombs were thrown at a Strasbourg synagogue.

  Nineteen eighty was even worse. A synagogue in the Marne was attacked in April. In May an organization for deportees and Resistance fighters was hit. In September a Jewish business was set on fire. A few days later, automatic weapons were fired on the central synagogue, a Jewish day care center, the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, and a school.

  On Friday, October 3, at 7:30, when the evening Sabbath service should have been ending, a bomb exploded in front of the Rue Copernic synagogue. Because the service had run a little late, there were fewer fatalities than planned. Still, more than twenty people were injured, including some inside the synagogue. Four people who had happened down the short street at the time were killed. One of them, by coincidence, was an Israeli tourist. The others were non-Jews. French Prime Minister Raymond Barre was quick to denounce “this odious attack which was intended for Jews on their way to the synagogue and which struck innocent Frenchmen crossing the street.”

  Was not this statement a symptom of one of the problems? A government which distinguished between Jews and innocent Frenchmen? The Jewish community had had enough. A huge demonstration was quickly organized with the labor unions and opposition political parties. Some 300,000 people marched against racism and anti-Semitism. Some estimates of the crowd were as high as 500,000. The wide, long boulevard that extends from Re-publique to Bastille was filled.

  An hour after the explosion, a telephone call claimed authorship ol the attack for a small neo-Nazi group called Federation d'Action Nationalists Europeenne, commonly known as FANE. The organization was officially banned one month later, which in practical terms only meant that it had to change its name. In Belgium and West Germany there were similar laws, and neo-Nazis had become skilled at running a variety of organizations and quickly turning one that was banned into another. The Flemish Military Organization, after being banned in 1983, became the Flemish Bloc. In Germany the Aktionsfront Nationaler Sozialisten was banned and became the Nationale Sammlung, which was banned and became the Deutsche Alternative. Year after year, the same people showed up at Diksmuide with different names for their organizations. The year after the French government banned FANE, the FANE activists were at Diksmuide under the name FNE. A mere inconvenience for the neo-Nazis, the name changes created total confusion for law enforcement.

  The police investigation could not show who had planted the bomb at the Rue Copernic synagogue. Accusations landed all over the political spectrum. Extreme right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen accused the KGB. Arabs and Basques came under suspicion. Increasingly, so did the French police, recalling that Pierre Goldman's unsolved murder was claimed by a group called “Honor of the Police.” A police union official, Jose Deltorn, asserted that he knew of thirty police officers who were active in extreme right-wing organizations, including FANE. But when the government challenged him, he was discredited because he could prove that only nineteen of these policemen were neo-Nazis.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front was becoming better organized. There was also something called the New Right, which was supposed to be highly intellectual. A popular newspaper magazine, Le Figaro, published articles in their Sunday magazine about biological determinism and the inherent inferiority and superiority of certain peoples. Le Figaro is published by France's leading press baron, Robert Hersant, who had gotten his start contributing to the collaborationist press of Vichy France.

  Middle East politics was also a factor in Europe's increasingly dangerous atmosphere. In 1977 the Labour party lost the Israeli elections, and power passed to Menachem Begin, a man who had previously been labeled a disreputable terrorist because of his war against the British Mandate and his extremist view on Palestinians. Begin's rise divided Jewish opinion. Aaron Waks in Dusseldorf cheered Begin's victory, but his two sons in Israel were appalled. The idea of a disreputable right-wing extremist as Israeli prime minister made the European leftist press even more sympathetic to the Palestinians, but an overall impression that the world was turning against Israel had already contributed to the rise of Israeli hardliners. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving official
sanction to a favorite European line of anti-Semitism. The resolution, in language that was very familiar in Central Europe, declared that Zionism was a form of racism. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, after committing numerous acts of terrorism, denounced the future use of terrorism and was accorded head-of-government status by the United Nations.

  UNDER GISCARD D‘ESTAING, French foreign policy became overtly pro-Arab. The PLO was permitted to open an office in Paris, Between 1973 and 1980 the price of oil went from $3 a barrel to more than $38, and undeveloped Arab nations were awash in cash that they were ready to spend on arms and other projects. Among the lucrative contracts France grabbed was one for a nuclear reactor for Iraq. The radical Arab nations also had money to finance small Palestinian breakaway groups that rejected Arafat's newly moderate position. It had been one such group that had sent Nasser Al-Saied to Antwerp.

  But the Jews of France were worried about Nazis, not Arabs. That was who history had conditioned them to fear. Even if the Copernic investigation was pointing toward the Middle East, it was clear that fascists were becoming increasingly active in France, and now at last, French people were united as never before against them. At last pressure was being put on a government that was so indifferent to right-wing extremism that President Giscard d'Estaing had not even interrupted his hunting weekend when news of the fatal synagogue bombing broke.

  The only group that ever claimed responsibility for the attack was FANE, in a telephone call made by a bodyguard named Jean-Yves Pellay. Pellay was a giant with close-cropped gray hair, a scar on his forehead, and a menacing grin with one tooth missing. He had a nervous twitch that caused him to blink both eyes tightly closed so that he always looked as if he were trying to make sure he was awake. At the time he was only 28 years old.

  Curiously, Pellay had been arrested in January 1980 for illegal possession of a firearm. He had been held for three months, during which time he was regularly questioned about which policemen were involved with FANE. This was nine months before the bombing and Jose Deltorn's accusation against the police.

  Warily looking around a cafe one year after the bombing, Pellay whispered a strange story of a Jewish mother and time he had spent in Israel and then in service with the French Foreign Legion. In F'aris he had been approached by a small radical Jewish group that wanted him to infiltrate FANE. While he was providing the neo-Nazis with paramilitary training, he was passing on information to the Jewish group. He said that he made the telephone call claiming the synagogue bombing for FANE not at the request of FANE but at the request of his Jewish contacts. This was confirmed by the contacts. A few more established Jewish figures also confirmed that they were involved in the recruiting and use of Pellay as a double agent. Involved in monitoring and reporting on the extreme right, they wanted the government to move against FANE. They were not concerned about obstructing the police's search for the real perpetrators, because they reasoned that the police investigation would lead nowhere. The French police never solved these cases. In time the Israeli secret service would solve it, and in the meantime they would have forced law enforcement to mobilize against the extreme right.

  As predicted, the French never solved the case, but in 1984 the Israeli secret service identified the Rue Copernic bombers as a dissident faction of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

  AUGUST IS Paris's quietest month. It is the month favored by Parisians for their month-long vacation. The only shops and restaurants that remain open are the ones trying to catch August tourists. In the old days this didn't have much to do with the Pletzl, since the poor immigrants who lived there had nowhere to go. But by the 1980s, even Rue des Rosiers closed down in August, except for Goldenberg's, whose business had become largely with tourists visiting the newly discovered Marais. At the height of the lunchtime rush on August 9, 1982, two men walked into Goldenberg's with Polish-made automatic pistols, and as staff and customers dove under tables and crawled behind counters, they sprayed bullets, systematically working from the cashier's counter along the bar to the tables, and even into the kitchen, where they shot a cook. Then, with the confidence of professionals, they backed out, still firing, and worked their way down Rue des Rosiers, walking calmly behind a white getaway car being driven by an accomplice while they watched doorways and windows and fired at anyone who appeared.

  Finkelsztajn's was closed for the month of August, but Henri was in the shop, seated behind the counter watching television. He heard small explosions, and since the shades were down on the storefront windows, he wondered what was going on in the street. He got up and went to the door and then realized it was probably just kids with firecrackers left over from Bastille Day. And so he went back to his seat behind the counter instead of walking outside into the automatic pistols of the two men, who were now in front of his store deciding whether to continue on Rue des Rosiers or turn up Rue des Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais. They took the smaller street past the Journos and fired on a cafe before vanishing from the neighborhood.

  A few minutes later, a bulletin appeared on television that there had been an attack on Rue des Rosiers. When Henri Finkelsztajn opened his door, people were running down the street. He walked down to where a crowd had gathered in front of Goldenberg's. There was blood on the ground, and people were wailing and shouting. Six people were dead and twenty-one wounded. Eighty spent bullets were found in the restaurant. A young Arab whose father, a longtime Goldenberg employee, had been killed was sobbing uncontrollably. The Algerian who now ran the cafe in the space next to Finkelsztajn was there. Andre Journo, who had taken to smoking large Cuban cigars, turned up and was making strong angry statements to journalists. Pletzl people stayed in the street all afternoon and argued about the Nazis and the PLO, which still had a Paris office, and the government and the police.

  When Finkelsztajn went home, he turned on the television news, which reported that young Jews had come to Rue des Rosiers and shouted anti-Arab slogans in a demonstration. Finkelsztajn had not seen Jews shouting anti-Arab slogans. There was no logic to it, since some of the victims were Arab and the neighborhood was increasingly mixed. He angrily telephoned the television station, France-3, told them who he was, and said that he had been there all day and there had been no such demonstration. It was explained to him that nevertheless the story was true, because a reporter had been there. Finkelsztajn was furious. There was no Arab-Jewish problem in the Pletzl—the press was inventing one.

  Mitterrand, the newly elected president, demonstrating the difference between himself and his predecessor, spoke at a memorial service at the Rue Pavee synagogue. But once again the French police could not find the attackers. Goldenberg stayed open the rest of the summer, but only a few friends or an occasional reporter came. No one wanted to eat lunch there. One Jewish woman went there to eat lunch at the counter out of defiance. “It's disgraceful. Disgraceful,” she said. “People have to come here to show them. Otherwise they have won.”

  Goldenberg sat in one of the red-upholstered booths looking defeated. He had been born on Rue des Rosiers in 1923. Three years later, his father, who came from Odessa by way of Turkey, had opened the little restaurant. In 1943, Jo Goldenberg came home late one day just in time to see the police take away both his parents and two younger sisters. They were all killed in Auschwitz. Now Goldenberg thought about how he seemed to always miraculously escape, always arrive a moment later. He had missed this attack, too, coming in fifteen minutes later. He preserved the window with the bullet holes just where it was and erected a plaque to the six victims. It was decided that the anniversary, August 9, should become a Pletzl event. “We must commemorate August 9 every year,” Andre Journo would say solemnly whenever a journalist showed up.

  Angry young Jewish men, some armed, some only claiming to be, began to patrol the Pletzl, stopping people, demanding identification, asking questions. They were often rude and abrasive, a belligerent amateur burlesque of tough cops. They were not going to
leave the safety of Jews in the hands of the French police any longer, and their deliberately exaggerated demeanor was to advertise the point that the Jews here on this street, where the police had quietly gathered up a previous generation forty years earlier, were no longer going to be the way they used to be.

  A YEAR BEFORE the Goldenberg attack, two people had been killed and seventeen wounded when a grenade and automatic pistols were turned on a Vienna synagogue. The same type of W Z-63 Polish automatic pistol had been used and traced to a Palestinian dissident group led by Abou Nidal. Although this group and that of Arafat were bitter enemies, the Vienna Jewish Community angrily blamed the Bruno Kreisky government for its friendly relations with the PLO. They believed that Kreisky, who happened himself to be Jewish, inadvertently encouraged terrorism.