By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent
Dr. Joel Mergui, the president of the umbrella organization of the Jewish community in Paris, said in an interview with Haaretz on Monday that he fears that a mass migration to Israel among French Jews could severely deplete the Paris community.
The fears Mergui expressed in his interview with Haaretz are held by quite a number of community leaders in the Jewish world, though few are willing to express them publicly.
"Out of 600,000 Jews living in France, only a third is in contact with the community, and educate their children in Jewish schools. A third is in the process of becoming assimilated, and another third is in the middle, on the fence - and we need to pull them in. All of the education of the Jewish community for years was based on ties and identification with Israel. My worry is that we succeeded too well, we worked so hard with the third of the community whose strong ties with Israel may possibly empty out the Paris community. This is not a fear of anti-Zionism," Mergui said.
Mergui has a few surprising figures, even for those who are used to seeing Israel's beaches filled with French Jewish tourists. According to his figures, there are 80,000 people with dual Israeli-French citizenship living in Israel today. Out of about 800 Jewish couples from Paris who married last year, about half held the wedding in Israel. Approximately 1,000 family celebrations of French Jews were held in Israel. Mergui said not a day passes without a funeral of a French Jew in Israel.
"It may be very heart-warming but the result is many fewer people passing through our synagogues in Paris and fewer use the community's services," he said. "You have to remember that for many Jews, the only time they go to the synagogue is for a wedding or bar mitzvah; and that is our chance to contact those Jews, and it is disappearing."
The affairs held in Israel cut into the finances of the community's institutions, in loss of revenue and of contributions related to the events. Also, a large percentage of the Jews called up to be honored in the Torah reading during the Shabbat and holiday synagogue service pledge money for Israel and the IDF, instead of for the local community.
There is a constant stream of almost 3,000 Jews a year coming on aliyah from France. In practice, it seems that the number is even greater since many Jews who move to Israel are not in a hurry to apply for Israeli citizenship.
Mergui met in Jerusalem with Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Minister of Immigrant Absorption Jacob Edrey and the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Ze'ev Bielski.
"I told them that all the years our goal was to help Israel; with contributions, tourism and aliyah. Now we need to think not only how to bring Jews to Israel but also how to maintain the community infrastructure in France. For 30 years I have been involved in the community as a Zionist, I am not against aliyah, but I want a realistic ideology. Our responsibility to Israel does not need to ignore our responsibility to our community. If it continues this way, in 20 years we are likely to lose half the community."
His goal, he explained, is to replace every Jew who comes to Israel with an uninvolved Jew he draws in. He added that he wants to reach the younger generation by expanding Sunday schools for pupils studying in non-Jewish schools. This requires investing large sums to make these schools much more prestigious; they have a poor image today, he said.
Mergui also intends to draw in college-age students by building a Jewish students' center near the Sorbonne and later placing a rabbi or Jewish intellectual at every large university in France.
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