Thousands attended the Jerusalem funeral of the four victims of the Jan. 9 terror attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris.
Yoav Hattab, 21, son of a Tunisian rabbi; Philippe Braham, 45, a computer engineer and father; Yohan Cohen, 22, a store employee killed trying to stop the terrorist; and Francois-Michel Saada, 64, who was preparing to make aliyah, were buried Jan. 13 at the Givat Shaul Cemetery, four days after they were murdered.
“Dear families, Yoav, Yohan, Philippe, Francois-Michel — this is not how we wanted to welcome you to Israel,” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said at the funeral. “This is not how we wanted you to arrive in the land of Israel, this is not how we wanted to see you come home, to the State of Israel, and to Jerusalem, its capital. We wanted you alive, we wanted for you, life.”
The victims “were murdered on the eve of the Sabbath, in a kosher supermarket in Paris, in cold blood, because they were Jewish,” Rivlin said. “This is sheer hatred of Jews, abhorrent, dark and premeditated, which seeks to strike wherever there is Jewish life.”
He called on the leaders of Europe to “commit to firm measures” to protect their communities’ Jews.
The four victims were killed by Islamic jihadist Amedy Coulibaly, who took more than 20 people hostage at the market. Coulibaly was killed when police stormed the shop. He reportedly told the hostages during the several-hour standoff: “I will die today, but you before. You are Jewish, and today you are going to die.”
Some attending the funeral held signs in French reading “Je suis Juif” and “Je suis Israelien” — “I am Jewish” and “I am Israeli” — above photos of the victims.
The family members together recited the Mourner’s Kaddish after being assisted in tearing their clothes in the traditional Jewish sign of mourning. They then lit memorial torches for their loved ones and said a few words.
One of the victims, Saada, had bought an apartment in Israel and was preparing to make aliyah.
“Francois-Michel was someone really generous that all his life he put his wife, his children, his friends before himself,” his son Yonatan told the crowd. “He was in love with Israel. He really wanted to live here. He’s here now.”
Braham’s widow, Valerie, said: “Philippe, my beloved, was a perfect man. A man who thinks of others before himself, a great husband and father who lived for his children. I’m crying, but I know that you’re all crying with me and I thank you all for that. Philippe, protect me, Naor and Elad,” she said, referring to her young children.
Rabbi Betto Hattab, a prominent rabbi at La Grande Synagogue in Tunis, could barely speak about his son Yoav, who had moved from Tunisia to Paris to further his studies.
“I accept the judgment of heaven with love,” he said, his voice breaking.
Yoav had been in Israel just weeks ago on a Birthright trip, and a photo of him wrapped in an Israeli flag at the Western Wall was prominently published in Israeli media.
It is not the Hattab family’s first experience with terrorism. Yoav Hattab’s aunt, whom he never met, was killed when she was 14 during an attack on a Djerba synagogue in 1985, when a policeman opened fire during prayers, killing three people.
Hattab also was mourned by many of his Muslim friends in Tunisia, who opened a Facebook page in his memory with eulogies and prayers in Arabic. Several of his friends wrote that he should have been buried in Tunisia, not in Israel. They also lamented the fact that they were unable to come to the funeral as Tunisia and Israel have no diplomatic relations.
The fourth victim, Yohan Cohen, died while trying to stop the terrorist. He reportedly grabbed one of Coulibaly’s guns, but it jammed. Coulibaly then shot him at point-blank range.
On Jan. 11, hundreds of mourners remembered the dead at a service in the Grand Synagogue of Paris attended by French President Francois Hollande and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu called on Europe and the rest of the world to support Israel’s fight against terror as supporters chanted “Bibi!” and “Israel will live, Israel will overcome.”
“Like the civilized world stands united with France, so it needs to stand with Israel in its fight against the same enemy exactly: radical Islam,” Netanyahu said.
“It’s a short distance between the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the murder of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, to the attacks on Jews in Israel, to the murders at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher,” he added.
The synagogue gathering was held immediately after a massive march in which millions walked through the heart of Paris in support of democratic values.
The march originally was scheduled as an act of public protest following the slaying of 12 people on Jan. 7 by Islamist terrorists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly that published many items lampooning Islam. But organizers later expanded it to commemorate the victims of the supermarket attack and a police officer slain in Paris on Jan. 8.
Cherif and Said Kouachi, brothers in their 30s, perpetrated the attack at Charlie Hebdo. They were killed Jan. 9 when police overtook the printing shop where they were holed up north of Paris. Coulibaly was an associate with whom the brothers had been recruited as jihadists to fight in Syria.
Coulibaly reportedly had maps of Jewish schools in his car on Jan. 8, a day before the attack on the supermarket, when he killed a police officer south of the city center.
French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia said the Jan. 10 march showed the French Jewish community “is not as isolated as we thought. For months we have been asking, where is France? Today we saw France, and the France we saw was a spitting image of biblical descriptions of Jerusalem, where brothers unite.” – jta & the media line