Thousands of mourners, the vast majority of them French immigrants, paid their respects here on Tuesday to four men whose lives were cut short when they entered a kosher supermarket on Friday and were then held hostage and killed. Gathered under the sun in a cemetery overlooking the scenic hills of Jerusalem, family members of the deceased bid farewell to their loved ones, and Israeli leaders offered their condolences. Mourners described the men as family.
“He was in love with Israel,” said Jonathan Saada, the son of 63-year-old Francois-Michel Saada, after lighting the first of four memorial torches. “He always wanted to live here and now he will. All his life he wanted to gather people and now he has.”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin offered the first official eulogy, and he began by addressing the deceased with words that drew many tears from the crowd. “Yoav, Yohan, Philippe, Francois-Michel, this is not how we wanted to welcome you to Israel,” he said. “This is not how we wanted to see you come home, to the State of Israel, and to Jerusalem, its capital. We wanted you alive, we wanted for you, life.”
He also directed his words at European leaders, whom he urged to do more to counter the anti-Semitism that has caused a record-breaking 7,086 French Jews to immigrate to Israel in 2014 alone.
“Regardless of what may be the sick motives of terrorists, it is beholden upon the leaders of Europe to act, and commit to firm measures to return a sense of security and safety to the Jews of Europe; in Toulouse, in Paris, in Brussels, or in Burgas,” he said. “We cannot allow it to be the case, that in the year 2015, 70 years since the end of the Second World War, Jews are afraid to walk in the streets of Europe with skullcaps and tzitzit” (the tasseled four-cornered garment worn by observant Jewish men).Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also spoke at the ceremony, and recalled the day less than three years ago when four other victims of anti-Semitism in France were buried here at the same cemetery. “These four victims are like [the] victims of Toulouse, killed only because they were Jewish,” said Netanyahu. He, too, had a message for world leaders about the dangers of religious intolerance. “I have said for years, and will say again today — these are not just the enemies of the Jewish people, but the enemy of humanity as a whole. The time has come for all civilized people to unite and uproot these enemies from our midst.”
Some in the crowd waved Israeli flags, or held signs bearing the smiling faces of the four murdered men, with various depictions of the phrases “I am Charlie,” “I am Yohan Cohen,” “I am a Jew,” and “I am dead because I am a Jew.” Hundreds of French flags were hung along the main streets of Jerusalem, along with signs in French that proclaim “Jerusalem is Charlie,” and signs in Hebrew that read “Jerusalem embraces the French people.”
