PARIS — Arnaud Beltrame was a 44-year-old police officer who sacrificed his life in a terrorist attack Friday. Mireille Knoll was an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor brutally killed in her Paris apartment the same day.
France on Wednesday commemorated both victims as the latest casualties in a struggle against terrorism and violent anti-Semitism.
The fallen officer received a state funeral and the posthumous distinction of commander of the Legion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest honors.
Later, tens of thousands gathered at the Place de la Nation to honor Knoll, marching through the streets wearing buttons and carrying signs with her picture.
Beltrame, a lieutenant colonel, volunteered to trade places with a hostage during a shootout at a supermarket in the southwestern French city of Trebes, part of an attack that killed four, including Beltrame.
Under the gilded shadow of Napoleon’s Tomb, French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday heralded the fallen officer as the embodiment of “the spirit of French resistance.”
“We will prevail with the cohesion of a united nation,” he added.
The theme of national unity was an ambitious choice, given the apparent homegrown nature of these and other recent attacks on French citizens.
Knoll’s killing focused attention on one of the darkest realities challenging a “united” France
France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, a community that receives considerable attention and protection from the state, especially in comparison with its European neighbors.
Yet Jews are the targets of a disproportionate number of racially motivated hate crimes in France — nearly a quarter, although Jews constitute only 1 percent of the total French population. According to statistics collected by the Interior Ministry, 214 of the 950 incidents reported in 2017 were anti-Semitic in nature.
A year before Knoll’s slaying, Sarah Halimi, a retired Orthodox doctor and kindergarten teacher, was killed in her Paris apartment, her body then hurled out a window. In 2012, three children and a teacher were murdered in an attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old cellphone salesman, was tortured by gang members who assumed his middle-class parents could pay a hefty ransom because they were Jewish.
