Jewish and Muslim Clerics Mourn Paris Concert Hall Victims
Image by Getty Images
French Jewish and Muslim clergy members led a memorial together for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris outside the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 people were killed and hundreds injured on Friday night.
The group, which included multiple French imams and representatives of the Paris Jewish community, laid bouquets of white roses on Sunday among the hundreds of candles left outside the theater by the public, the Guardian reported.
“Anyone who uses hate speech has no place in France, and those places that preach hate are not places of prayer but are those of a sect,” Hassen Chalgoumi, the president of the imams’ conference of France, told a crowd of several dozen people. “1.5 million people are hostages of Daesh [an Arabic acronym for ISIS], 1.5 million people are hostages of these barbarians who are sullying the name of Islam and Muslims. It’s time to say no to this barbarity.”
Chalgoumi said that ISIS has a “fatwa” against him calling for his death.
The memorial was the idea of Polish-Jewish author Marek Halter, who has written extensively on his family, which escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
