PARIS (EJP)—French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb strongly condemned a violent anti-Semitic aggression last Thursday in which three members of a Jewish family were tied up, beaten and robbed by attackers who told their victims, “you are Jews, you have money.”
During the aggression, three individuals identified as black men in their late twenties broke into the house of Roger Pinto, the president of SIONA, a group representing Sephardic Jews, in Livry Gargan, a commune in the north east of Paris. They cut off the electricity in the house, tied up Pinto’s son, and held and beat his wife. It was only on Friday morning, several hours later, that Pinto managed to discreetly contact police, causing the intruders to flee.
"They knocked me down and then hit me until I almost lost consciousness, I think it was planned and we had terrible moments. they were three black youths who were particularly violent and who promised to 'kill us' if we did not give them what they wanted," said Roger Pinto.
"They repeated it several times, and what struck me was that my wife said to them, 'We have nothing to give you'" and they replied : 'if you are Jewish, you have a lot of money' ".
The Jewish family was taken to hospital for treatment following the assault, during which cash, credit cards and jewelry were stolen. The family suffered some minor injuries but were deeply traumatized. An investigation was opened by the prosecutor's office for theft aggravated by several circumstances – including the fact that the the aggression appears to have been committed due to the religion of the victims – aggravated extortion and sequestration.
Minister Collomb expressed his ‘’indignation’’ in a statement which says that ‘’according to the first elements, the motivation for this cowardly act seems to be directly related to the religion of the victim.’’
He expressed his “profound support for the family and for the Jewish institutions of France.”
“Every effort will be made to identify and arrest the authors of this odious aggression,” the minister said. The statement added: “The Minister has full confidence in the Paris police services to take determined action in this enquiry.”
The statement also recalled the French government’s determination ‘’to do everything to combat every form of racism and anti-Semitism, which have no place in the French Republic.”
The BNVCA called the attack “manifestly anti-Semitic” and “premeditated,” and said the family was “threatened with death” and “violently beaten.”
Francis Kalifat, president of CRIF, the umbrella representative group of France’s Jewish community, said that “this odious act is proof, if we needed any, that the Jews of France are especially threatened in the street, and even more disturbingly, within their very homes.”
Joël Mergui, President of the Jewish Consistory of France, said the Pintos are still very shocked by the anti-Semitic violence of their three aggressors ‘’who seemed to know their identity perfectly.’’
The community noted that the attack on the Pinto family follows the grizzly murder last April of 65- year- old Sarah Halimi, first tortured and then thrown from her third floor balcony of her apartment by a Muslim neighbor who screamed ‘Allahu Akbar.'”
Jewish organization have protested the reluctance of the French judicial authorities to treat Halimi’s murder as an anti-Semitic hate crime.
The community also recalled a similar aggression of a young Jewish couple in Creteil, a Paris suburb, in December 2014.