France’s Ministry of Culture has launched a new award for initiatives to combat anti-Semitism named in honor of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew murdered in 2006, Ben Cohen reported in The Algemeiner on Thursday.
Halimi was kidnapped by the self-styled “Gang of Barbarians,” a group of largely Muslim men, who tortured him to death because he was Jewish and thought his family or other Jews would pay for his freedom. Halimi’s burned and naked body was left for dead by a railway track outside of Paris. He died of his wounds just a few hours after being discovered.
The award in his honor was announced on Monday by French Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen, and will be awarded annually on February 13, the anniversary of Halimi’s death. Nyssen said the award “will reward projects run by young people under the age of 25 to fight racist and antisemitic stereotypes.”
The minister also remembered the ten Jews murdered in France since the Halimi killing, saying that the award was in recognition of them too.
The victims, “murdered on French soil because they were Jewish,” Nyssen said, included three children and a teacher killed in an attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, the victims of the kosher market siege in Paris in January 2015, as well as the murder of elderly Paris widows Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll, who were murdered in their own homes in April 2017 and March 2018 respectively.
On Thursday, Mireille Knoll’s son Daniel praised his mother as a woman who “did not live a banal life.” He added that “She died in horrible circumstances. People need to know that we can still die today because we are Jewish.”
The murder of Halimi and Knoll were the latest in a series of anti-Semitic attacks, which have rocked European cities in recent years.
In Parisian suburbs, French children wearing religious symbols or the uniform of their Jewish school have been beaten and knifed, leading to Jewish leaders in France and Germany advising the Jewish communities not to wear kippahs in public anymore.
According to the annual “Antisemitism Worldwide” report by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, released in April 2018, the “most disturbing” element of the study was “the prevalent ominous feeling of insecurity among Jews in Europe, recently intensified by the murder of two women in their homes in Paris.”
The report noted: “The anti-Semitism atmosphere has become a public arena issue, intensively dealt with vis-a-vis a triangle made of the constant rise of the extreme right, a heated anti- Zionist discourse in the left, accompanied by harsh anti-Semitic expressions and radical Islamism.”
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