"…French Jews often talk about aliyah as a potential necessity, but never as something easy.…How could you not leave, when your child might not make it back from school, on a continent that knows the dangers of obscurantism all too well? At the same time, how could you leave, when these are the streets where you learned to walk, this is the language in which you say “I love you,” this is the first image your brain shows you when someone talks about home? On a very basic human level, when conditions threaten to pull you out of your home by the collar, how could you not hold on to the doorknob?"
Mouchka Darmon Heller, a niece of Philippe Braham, one of the victims of the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket terror attack in Paris, now lives and works in New York City after stuying at Yeshiva University. She writes in the Jewish Week:
…French Jews often talk about aliyah as a potential necessity, but never as something easy. (North African Jews immigrated to France during and after the wars of independence there in the 1960, largely because they felt a cultural tie to France.) Thousands have already left, many heading for Israel. After events like last week’s, the old questions are resurfacing, in my family and in many others in France. How could you not leave, when your child might not make it back from school, on a continent that knows the dangers of obscurantism all too well? At the same time, how could you leave, when these are the streets where you learned to walk, this is the language in which you say “I love you,” this is the first image your brain shows you when someone talks about home? On a very basic human level, when conditions threaten to pull you out of your home by the collar, how could you not hold on to the doorknob?
What is happening in France is very real and concrete, and it can be mistaken for a specifically French issue. It isn’t. The question is not about French Jews making aliyah or not. It isn’t about whether France should be blamed for not being safe enough. Jihadism is a transnational issue that affects values that we all claim to stand for. The families of the victims feel the loss of their loved ones, and they hear the cries of their children. These were innocents who were cut down for no reason other than what they represented. But what they represented is all of us. And this is what was attacked. By shooting the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, the terrorists shot all of us who write, read, talk and think. By shooting policemen and policewomen, they shot all of us who have ever protected someone. And by shooting the consumers of a kosher grocery store, they killed all of us who go about the life we have chosen for ourselves.
But if we keep the memory of those who have fallen, then the attackers shot at the power to write, but they missed; they shot at the power to read and think, but they missed; they shot at the responsibility we have in protecting our own, but they missed; they shot at our right to live the lives we have chosen for ourselves, but they missed.…
Read it all here.