After the swastikas drawn on the walls of Paris and Strasbourg, the threats to synagogues and schools – for a total of almost 1,000 anti-Semitic acts since 7 October – in France a woman was stabbed at home by a stranger with his face covered, who he rang the doorbell and attacked her.
He then fled, but not before carving a swastika on the door of the house with his knife. Right next to the “mezuzah”, the scrolls with passages from the Torah that are frequently displayed on the doorpost of the house by Jews. It happened shortly after 1pm in the 3rd arrondissement of Lyon, in the Montluc district, in rue Jeanne-Hachette, an avenue with a long row of white, rather familiar buildings, all with small terraces or balconies. Someone rang the doorbell and the 30-year-old woman went to open it. She told the policemen who questioned her for a long time in her hospital bed – two stab wounds hit her in the abdomen but her life was not in danger – that the man, dressed in black and with his face covered, told her simply said “good morning”. Then he attacked her with the knife.
“The family – the victim’s lawyer, Stéphane Drai, told BFM TV – is known for being a Jewish family.” Before fleeing, the man carved a swastika on his victim’s door. The police are not ruling anything out at the moment, but the sources of the local newspaper, Le Progrès, assure that the favored trail is that of anti-Semitic aggression. The investigation was immediately opened for “attempted murder” and entrusted to the judicial police. For the lawyer Drai, “the anti-Semitic motive has already been demonstrated”. “A woman of Jewish religion – tweeted the mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet – she was stabbed. An anti-Semitic inscription was found on the door of her house. Such an explosion of violence is unspeakable. All my support to the victim and her family.”
«The victim, his family and the entire Jewish community are in shock – declared the lawyer – after the words and the ‘tags’ on the walls, there was a move to action. By opening the door of our house, we didn’t know, until now in France, that we could be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack that could be defined as attempted murder.” At the beginning of the week, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, had announced that since 7 October, the day of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli territory, 819 anti-Semitic acts had been recorded in France: «Without any doubt it is the transfer of this conflict of the Middle East in our cities. All the Jewish families are worried”, the local president of the Crif (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions), Richard Zelmati, commented a few days ago during a demonstration in Lyon. Last Saturday, in Lyon itself, the first anti-Semitic ‘tags’ appeared, including swastikas, on the facade of a state school.