On my first day traveling in Dijon this past spring, I bounded into the hotel lobby and casually reached for a newspaper lying on the reception desk. The front-page headline of Le Figaro riveted my attention. Quickly, I devoured the story. It described an unprecedented upsurge in the number of French Jews moving to Israel in the first months of 2014, on the heels of an unprecedented number who’d emigrated there the year before.
The Jewish population in France, larger than any country in Europe, stands between 450,000 and 500,000. Le Figaro reported that roughly 1 percent moved to Israel in 2013 — 70 percent higher than in 2012 — and that the numbers were exploding in 2014. The Jewish Agency for Israel reported that as of Aug. 31, 4,566 had left, and it predicted that at least 5,000 would leave by the end of 2014. That compares to 3,289 who left in 2013 and 1,917 in 2012.
A couple of days before reading that story, I’d visited a museum in Paris that had once been a private home. Patterned on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, it was built in 1911 for Count Moise de Camondo, a Sephardic Jew born in Istanbul who’d made a fortune in banking. The majestic home was tinged with sadness, its jaw-dropping décor and Camondo’s precious collection of paintings, sculptures, tableware and furniture countered by a stark background story.
Camondo planned to leave the home to his children. But in 1917, Camondo’s only son, Nissim, was killed fighting for France in World War I. Devastated, the father decided to cede the home to the government of France in the name of his son upon his death. The year after he died in 1935, the house became Musée Nissim de Camondo and today remains exactly as it looked then, pristine in every stunning detail. It’s sobering to learn that a few years later, Camondo’s remaining child, daughter Beatrice, was sent to Auschwitz, along with her husband and their two children, and the family line ceased to exist.
Standing in a hotel lobby in Dijon reading the news story, it struck me that no amount of sacrifice, no show of loyalty to the state, and no sum of money could protect a Jew in Nazi-occupied France. And what about today? The newspaper reported a “spectacular” rise in the number of Jews departing for Israel in the first few months of 2014 — an increase of 312 percent over the same period last year.
No definitive reason was cited. The economic recession bore part of the blame. Jobs were scarce in France, and Israel offered employment in select fields. But the director of the Paris-based L’Agence Juive (Jewish Agency) also mentioned that “a certain sentiment of insecurity” existed in the wake of the killings of three Jewish children and a rabbi in Toulouse in March of 2012. And just days after the article in Le Figaro appeared, a French citizen with ties to radical Islamists in Syria admitted gunning down four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels.
Wandering the pedestrian-friendly streets of Dijon, where narrow old-world lanes encircle elegant open plazas, I caught sight of a grand structure surrounded by a fence at the city’s edge. With its high dome and towers, it looked Islamic. I approached the locked gate. A Jewish star. Hebrew writing. I was standing in front of Dijon’s synagogue, across a street named for Elie Cyper. Who was Elie Cyper? And who were the Jews of Dijon?
A recently published book shed light. Lafayette College history professor Robert Weiner and co-author Richard Sharpless, professor emeritus at the Pennsylvania school, assembled an oral history of the Jewish community in Dijon derived from 18 years of research. “An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940-2012” contains personal accounts of life in Dijon from the Holocaust and beyond, through times of “optimistic growth and expansion, followed by division, slow decline, and uncertainty about the future.”
From the book, I learned that Dijon now has about 225 Jewish families in an urban population of 150,000; that the Jewish community has played an important role in the city despite its small numbers; that the city’s Jews are a mix of secular and religious, Sephardi and Ashkenazi; that Jews first came to Dijon in the Middle Ages and were expelled in the 1400s; and that they returned after the French Revolution and have never left.
I learned that the synagogue, completed in 1879, served a robust community then numbering 550 people; that Jews were absorbed into the mainstream in the next several decades; that 80 percent of the community perished at the hands of the Nazis, including a 36-year-old rabbi named Elie Cyper, a member of the Resistance, and the man for whom that street was named; and that unlike other synagogues in France destroyed by the Nazis, Dijon’s survived thanks to the intervention of a city official who convinced the Germans the building would be useful as a warehouse and hid the Torah and other sacred objects.
Those contributing oral histories to the book evince a feeling of great pride in being a French Jew; pride, too, in the vital Jewish community they’ve tried to create in Dijon and the ties they’ve built to the wider community. At the same time, there’s great apprehension for the future of Jewish life in Dijon, for the future of Jews in France and for the future of Israel. They worry about dwindling numbers, intermarriage and anti-Semitism.
The authors of the book draw the conclusion that the mix of pride and concern in Dijon presents a mirror of Jewish life in communities around Europe.
And they wonder: Does it mirror Jewish life in communities everywhere?
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