French Teacher Says He Hides Kippah After Machete Attack
Benjamin Amsellem Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — On the eve of a landmark trial for terrorism in France, the alleged victim of the teenage defendant said that he has begun concealing his kippah following the suspected attack.
Benjamin Amsellem, a teacher from Marseilles, told the news website 20 Minutes on Tuesday about how his life was turned upside down following last year’s incident, in which police say a radicalized youth of Turkish descent lightly wounded Amsellem using a machete in Marseilles.
Having moved to the Paris region as part of his therapy, Amsellem, who said he never used to fear wearing a kippah in Marseilles, now prefers “to wear a hat instead of the kippah in places where I don’t feel safe,” he said during the interview, which was published one day before the opening of his alleged attacker’s trial Wednesday in a Paris juvenile court.
According to the AFP news agency, which defined the trial as “a sad precedent,” it is the first time that a minor under the age of 18 is being tried in France for allegedly committing a jihadist attack. The youth, whose name was not published in the media, was 15 when he allegedly attacked Amsellem and fled the scene of the incident after Amsellem fought him off using a Hebrew bible book to shield his body from the knife.
The attack was particularly shocking to Amsellem’s community in Marseilles, France’s second largest ciry with 80,000 Jews, because it had seen proportionately fewer anti-Semitic attacks than in Paris, where hundreds are recorded annually.
Following the attack, Tzvi Amar, the president of the Marseilles branch of the Consistoire – the community organization responsible for providing religious services to French Jews – caused controversy with his call for Jews to conceal their kippahs.
It was also a life-changing experience for Amsellem, who is still undergoing therapy to deal with the psychological effects of the attack. While the trial has brought back “something I try not to think of,” he decided to talk to the media to say that “it exists, it can happen and one needs to be careful, one needs to take precautions to save one’s life.”
According to the defendant’s lawyer, Merabi Murgulia, the defendant has confessed to committing the actions for which he is standing trial, and regrets them profoundly.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
