Babette and Sasha Bergman are Jewish high-tech professionals in their 30s. They met while working at Google’s European headquarters in Ireland, and settled in central Paris shortly ahead of the birth of their now 4-year-old daughter, Daniella.
On weekends, they enjoy entertaining friends in their spacious apartment in the 17th arrondissement — an upscale and heavily Jewish district where the anti-Semitic incidents common throughout the rest of Paris are more rare.
Living on a street with three synagogues and near many kosher shops, Sasha said observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher is far easier in Paris, where some 350,000 Jews live, than it was in Dublin.
But in the wake of last week’s jihadi attacks in Paris that killed at least 129, the Bergmans are finding it increasingly difficult to imagine a future for themselves in a country where terrorism and violence — including attacks that target the Jewish community — are putting wind into the sails of a rising far-right agenda.
“I love this city, I love my country, but after the initial shock from the attacks and the pain, my first thought was regret that we decided to settle here,” said Babette, who is Sephardic and grew up in the French city of Lyon. Two of her three sisters moved recently to Israel.
In January, soldiers with automatic rifles were posted regularly outside the Bergmans’ building to guard an adjacent synagogue. It was a precaution taken following the slaying by Islamic radicals of 12 people at the offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo newspaper, followed by two other terrorist attacks, including one at the kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher in eastern Paris that killed four. The supermarket attack came about three years after an Islamic terrorist killed three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.
“We pass them by sometimes with Daniella,” Babette said of the soldiers guarding Jewish institutions. “We’re grateful, but it’s not a normal way to live.”
Two days after the deadly Nov. 13 attack, Babette’s family from Lyon and Israel gathered in Paris for a cousin’s wedding at the Synagogue des Tournelles in the Marais, the city’s historic Jewish district.
After the ceremony, the congregants left the synagogue quickly, mostly to make room for the next wedding — four Jewish wedding ceremonies were planned that day — but also because some guests said they felt uncomfortable gathering among groups of Jews at a time when terrorists involved in the attacks were still at large.
“We’re not too scared to come here and continue our lives as usual,” said Ness Berros, a French Jew in his 20s who attended the wedding. “But we’re too scared to feel exactly at ease right now.”
The synagogue is under heavy guard by soldiers and police officers. Security was even tighter at another event the same day at the Synagogue de la Victoire, also known as the Grand Synagogue of Paris, at a ceremony honoring the victims of the attacks. The road leading to the synagogue was cordoned off as the participants were patted down for concealed weapons.
Outside Jewish institutions, many of which had suspended their activities following the attacks, streets usually bustling with tourists and locals were much emptier than they otherwise would have been on a sunny Sunday afternoon in November.
Fears were just as pronounced outside the city, in its poorer suburbs, where tens of thousands of Jews live in close proximity to many Muslims — and where tensions often run high.
The majority of Paris-area Jews who immigrated to Israel last year came from such neighborhoods, according to Jewish Agency figures. In total, 6,658 French Jews immigrated to Israel last year, more than three times the total number in 2012.