paris | It’s a few hours before Shabbat in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris, and a Lubavitch Chassid is helping an elderly Tunisian Jew put on tefillin in the doorway of a kosher butchery.
Across the street, bearded Muslim vendors are hawking sweets and pastries to crowds of North African immigrants for the nightly Ramadan break-fast meal, called the iftar.
Further down the boulevard lined with kosher restaurants, Ouali Boussad, an Algerian Berber, prepares coffee at the Lumiere de Belleville café.
Despite the tensions that have marked Muslim-Jewish ties in France in recent years, this neighborhood in northeastern Paris has managed to stay relatively free of them.
“A whole generation here has worked, lived and grown up together,” says Serge Cohen, who runs a kosher bakery off the boulevard. “It’s a different situation in the suburbs. Jews are separated from Muslims and they mistrust each other.”
Locals in Belleville are fiercely proud of the climate of tolerance in their neighborhood.
Some 350,000 Jews live in the Paris metropolitan area. In Belleville, most Jewish residents and workers are of Tunisian descent.
“Tunisians are the most open-minded Jews — they are basically like us,” says a Muslim customer at Soltane, a Belleville halal butchery.
Like the Jews from Algeria and Morocco, Tunisian Jews lived side by side with Arabs for centuries, sharing common food, language and music. Following the dissolution of the French colonial empire in the 1950s and 1960s, North African Jews and Muslims flocked to the urban hills of northern Paris.
On a typical Sunday on the grimy side streets off the Boulevard de Belleville, old men drink mint tea and argue in Arabic outdoor cafés adorned with photos of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, while restaurants feature live bands with Arab musicians playing for enthusiastic Jewish dancers.
“The older Jews feel at home in Belleville because it reminds them of Tunisia, where Jews and Arabs interacted daily,” says Laurent Allouche, director of a Jewish funeral home.
Belleville has not always been peaceful. Significant clashes between Tunisian Jews and Arabs broke out here following the 1967 Six-Day War, and again in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War.
Last summer, tensions ran high in the district neighboring Belleville, Paris’ 19th arrondissement, when street fights between youth gangs culminated in the savage beating of a 17-year-old Jew, Rudy Haddad. And many French Jews remain shaken by the kidnapping, torture and murder of a 23-year-old Jew, Ilan Halimi, in 2006.
Some Jews, however, say Halimi’s death had less to do with anti-Semitism than gang and class warfare.
“It could have been anyone,” says a butcher at Henrino’s kosher butchery. “It could have been someone named Mohammed.”
Annie Paule Derczansky, director of a grassroots organization called Peace Builders, is working to deepen coexistence by organizing meetings between Jewish and Arab women from the neighborhood. This summer she held a halal/kosher picnic with some 150 local Jews and Arabs in the Butte Chaumont, a hot spot for intercommunal violence in 2008.
“We held the picnic without any police security,” she says. “Observant Jews and Muslims attended, mingled and enjoyed kosher ice cream and cotton candy — served by Muslim vendors in the park.”
In Belleville, it remains to be seen if the next generation will continue the tradition of coexistence practiced by their ancestors.
Sitting in his funeral home with Rabbi Yehuda Gour Arie, a local Torah scribe and mohel, Allouche reflects on Belleville’s future.
“The neighborhood is changing,” he says. “Up until the early 1990s there were more than 200 Jewish-owned businesses. Today there are only about 15.”
Outside, Arielle, 19, stands with some friends.
“I grew up here and went to school at Ozar Hatorah down the street,” she says. “I have plenty of Arab friends. We share many of the same traditions, which are passed down from previous generations. That is the most important thing in Belleville.”