Seven decades after the liberation of Jews from Hitler’s camps, the crime of being Jewish while European remains real. With the exception of Germany, little or no effort has been made to entice Jews to remain. This leaves the alternative of living where you are less than wanted or leaving.
France is am especially painful example. The country has the third largest number of Jews of any country in the world. French law also requires all French citizens to adhere to a common French culture, no ethnic or racial identities are allowed. While this is most obvious in dealing with Islam’s rules for female attire in public, there is a common belief that all citizens should assimilate to the French secular meme. Put another way, the kind of strongly flavored ethnicity common among Jews in the US, would make life difficult for a Jew living n France.
Now, with Europe’s versions of the Tea Party on the rise, increasing numbers of French Jews are leaving for Israel, some of this is the economy but a lot is the sense of being caught between an increasingly influential far right and a growing anti Semitic Muslim population. More than 5,000 French Jews, out of a population of 500,000 will immigrate to Israel this year, the most since after the Six-Day War in 1967.