https://www.jns.org/opinion/macrons-unsettling-words-until-our-dead-can-sleep-in-peace/
Barely a year can pass, it seems, without some episode or incident in France that compels its ancient Jewish community to wonder whether they have a future there at all.
One of the criticisms leveled at the numerous Holocaust memorials dotted around Europe is their alleged tendency to, as an American Jewish leader memorably put it to me, “encourage Europeans to commemorate dead Jews, and ignore what’s happening to the living Jews.”
But even that goal appears beyond reach these days. French President Emmanuel Macron inadvertently said as much last week when he pledged, in the wake of the desecration of 107 graves in a Jewish cemetery in the eastern Alsace region, that France would fight anti-Semitism “until our dead can sleep in peace.”
There was, of course, little doubt as to Macron’s essential point: Anti-Semitism in his own country and in the rest of Europe is becoming so intolerable that even the dead are impacted. Still, his choice of words will have reminded many listeners that Europe’s history means its lands are full of dead Jews, most of them in unmarked graves. They may also have been unsettled by the sense of despair lurking within Macron’s comment: We can’t even protect dead Jews anymore, he seemed to be saying.
In fact, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries by far-right elements in France is hardly unknown. During the 1980s, nearly a dozen Jewish cemeteries were vandalized in different parts of the country. Famously, in May 1990, 200,000 people attended a protest demonstration after gravestones at the cemetery in Carpentras, a historic Jewish center in France, were daubed with swastikas by a group of violent neo-Nazis. Most gruesomely, the desecrators exhumed a body from one of the graves and left it on display with a Star of David rammed through the chest.
