ByNaomi Firsht, Naomi Firsht
A few weeks ago I was in Bergen Belsen concentration camp trying to comprehend the atrocities that happened over 70 years ago. This morning I walked into a children’s playground in Toulouse and tried to understand a horror that happened just three years ago.
On March 19 2012, Muslim extremist Mohammed Merah forced his way into Ohr Torah (formerly Ozar Hatorah) school and shot dead three school children and a teacher for the crime of being Jewish.
The buildings are low and square, in a cheerful orange coloured stone, nothing extraordinary, just your average school building. But the high surrounding walls, topped with barbed wire (added since the attack), and the line of policemen along the road outside, remind you that something awful happened here.
The Conference of European Rabbis (CER) have come here to pray and hold a memorial service, having chosen Toulouse as the venue for their convention in a mark of solidarity with the community.
They file into the school’s synagogue, a sombre procession all in black, to take the morning prayers.
Head teacher of the school Rabbi Yaacov Monsenego, who lost his eight-year-old daughter Myriam in the attack, speaks in Hebrew to the group. After the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel Yitzhak Yosef has spoken, a cantor recites kaddish – the memorial prayer. Rabbi Monsenego looks on, arms folded, his face set and unreadable.
After the ceremony the rabbis file outside and gather together in front of the school for a photo. To see 200 rabbis at the site of such a sickening antisemitic attack is an impressive, even hopeful sight.
CER executive director and rabbi of Paris suburb Raincy Moche Lewin said CER wanted the ceremony at the school to carry a positive message: “It was important to show the Jewish community is here and has no intention of running away,” he said.
In the wake of such tragedy it seems the only fitting response.