Silent marches are taking place in Paris and other large French cities in memory of an 85-year-old woman who survived the Holocaust but was stabbed to death last week, in what is being investigated as an antisemitic attack.
After killing Mireille Knoll, her attackers set her local authority flat alight in a poor area of the French capital. Two men, aged 22 and 29 – one of them a neighbour known to the victim since he was a child, have been arrested and placed under formal investigation.
Family members of Mireille Knoll, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who was stabbed to death and set on fire in her Paris apartment on Friday night, told Israeli media on Tuesday she had known one of her assailants, a Muslim neighbor, since he was seven years old.
Israel’s Hadashot TV news reported on Monday that the primary suspect was previously jailed for sexually assaulting the daughter of a woman who helped look after Knoll.
Friends and family had urged French people to turn out for the silent marches, arguing the killing was not just an outrage perpetrated against a member of the Jewish community but against the community as a whole.
The killing of Knoll last Friday has raised questions about France’s failure to tackle resurgent antisemitism. Last year, Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman, was beaten and thrown out of the window of her home.
French president Emmanuel Macron attended Knoll’s funeral on the outskirts of Paris on Wednesday after paying tribute to the hero gendarme, Arnaud Beltrame. In his speech at the state ceremony honouring the fallen gendarme, killed by a suspected Islamist gunman, Macron said Knoll’s killers had “murdered an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish … and in doing so, profaned our sacred values and our history.”
The march in Paris on Wednesday evening sparked political rows after the far-right Front National leader Marine Le Pen and hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon announced they would ignore requests from Jewish leaders to stay away.
Leaders of CRIF, the umbrella group for French Jewish communities, had indicated neither were welcome, but Knoll’s son Daniel contradicted the organisation saying “everyone without exception” could attend.
Noa Goldfarb, Knoll’s granddaughter who now lives in the sea-side Israeli town of Herzliya, also said her grandmother had known the suspect “since he was seven years old, and was always happy to see him. It’s unbelievable that it ended like this.”
In a Tuesday interview with Israel Radio, Goldfarb said, “Grandma didn’t believe in evil. That may be the reason she’s no longer with us.”
