Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

15-Year-Old French Girl Assaulted In Jewish School

(JTA) — A 15-year-old girl was assaulted inside her Jewish school near Paris by three individuals who confronted her outside the establishment and then pursued her into its yard, a French daily reported.

The incident, which prosecutor may or may not be anti-Semitic, occurred last week at the Ozar-Hatorah school in Sarcelles, Le Parisien reported Wednesday. The victim did not know the three individuals, who appeared to be teenagers, who threatened to “gouge out the eyes and pull the hair” from her head at the entrance, she told police.

The girl ran back into the school for safety but the three teenagers who confronted her followed her in, cornering her and delivering blows to her bodies. Two of them pulled at her hair while a third filmed the incident on a cell phone, the report said. The violence continued for several minutes despite the presence on campus of a security guard, according to the report. A teacher finally put a stop to it.

The girl’s mother and the girl filed a complaint for assault with police on June 7. The local prosecutor’s office told Le Parisien: “The alleged anti-Semitic character of the incident has not been established in certain terms at this stage of the investigation.”

Police are working to identify the alleged perpetrators, also using security camera footage of the incident. The report did not say whether the suspects are male of female.

Whereas in the 1990s the majority of Jewish children attended public schools in France, only a third of them do so today, according to Francis Kalifat, the head of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities. Thousands have left the public education system due to anti-Semitism, he said.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.