French Jews are leaving France in ever-growing numbers, fleeing a wave of anti-Semitism. Today, Mireille Silcoff meets a family of French Jews who have recently arrived in Montreal, and examines the effect the influx of thousands of French Jews will have on the largely anglophone Jewish community.

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MONTREAL - Frederic Saadoun and his wife, Valerie, moved to Montreal with their two children from Paris in August. Both IT workers, they found jobs, and Jewish Immigration Aid Services (JIAS) helped them locate a comfortable apartment in a western Montreal duplex. "But we were terribly homesick," says Mrs. Saadoun, a French-born Jew of Algerian descent. "We missed our family. We had friends in Paris who we saw regularly for 20 years. Here we found other Jews who had just come from France, and our children play together, but still, everything was alien. The first two months were very hard."

Mr. Saadoun knew they had made the right decision last month. He had attended a Jewish New Year service with his eight-year-old son, Yoni. Upon leaving the synagogue, he says, "Yoni looked at me and he said, very alarmed, 'Papa! You are wearing your skullcap on the street. You must take it off! It is not safe!' "

"I told him that in Canada you can wear a kippa on the street with no fear of danger. When I said it, I immediately thought, Thank goodness we're here. It will be good for us here."

Twenty-five years ago, there were over 100,000 Jews in Montreal, and more than 60% of them were anglophones. But the sovereignty referendums had a transformational effect on the city's Jewish community. Many thousands of English-speaking Jews left in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. In particular, singles and young families moved, notably to Toronto, en masse.

There are approximately 85,000 Jews in Montreal today. The reduction in population is not just the product of the English fearing an independent Quebec, but also the outcome of issues that are being faced by Jewish communities across North America, including skyrocketing rates of intermarriage, and in the non-Orthodox community, low birth rates and an ageing population.

"Jewish continuity" is without question among the top issues in North American Jewish communities today. Institutions such as the B'nai B'rith and Hillel engage in hundreds of programs designed specifically to keep the Jewish young "in the fold." They are only moderately successful. Which is why Jewish communities like that of Montreal have welcomed new immigrants.

"The community has made a decision to build through the reception of new immigrants," says Shellie Ettinger, executive director of JIAS Montreal. "When we saw the drop to well under 100,000 Jews in the last census [2001], it was like, 'Yeah. We gotta do something.' It became clear that strong continuity was not going to be achieved on the purely local level."

About the same time, Ms. Ettinger says JIAS "began seeing news about anti-Semitic incidents in France, and real estate agents told us they were getting a lot of buying of properties by French individuals by fax and e-mail. We started noticing some French kids in the schools, and people in the community were hearing things from abroad, too. They were coming to us saying, 'You've got to get them out.'"

The mandate of an organization like JIAS is not to "get them out," says Ms. Ettinger, but "to service those who want to come."

This is an important point, not least because of the Zionist politics of taking in immigrants who might otherwise move to Israel, at a time when immigration to Israel has decreased dramatically (while emigration from Israel has expanded enormously).

"I don't like bodysnatching," says Monique Matza, an immigration consultant and analyst in Montreal who has worked with JIAS and the Quebec government on issues involving Jewish immigration to Quebec. "And the organizations in France will not accept someone coming in and stealing from their community. Jewish France does not want to lose its Jews, and for that matter, neither does the French government."

France's Jewish community is incredibly centralized, with almost every Jewish institution running through an umbrella organization called the Crif. "The Crif was slow to admit that there was a problem in France," says Sylvain Abitbol, president of Federation CJA.

Ms. Ettinger agrees. "The patriarchs of the French community were not ready to see their children leaving," she says. "They were less than welcoming to us a few years ago, but once synagogues started being bombed in France, and they saw that we were close with Immigration Quebec, who are obviously not on a Jew-courting campaign, they began to warm up."

Sources at JIAS believe that close to 1,000 French Jews arrived in Montreal this year alone. They foresee a similar number coming in 2006.

Mr. Abitbol says that while the effect of this influx is not felt in any considerable way, it will be soon. "We are a small community," he says, "it won't take long."

When you walk in the shopping corridors of popular Jewish neighbourhoods such as Cote St. Luc, Mr. Abitbol says, "you are already hearing more of those French accents. And you see other signs -- there's a new kosher restaurant downtown that's been opened by the French, and [there are] French groups taking their own space in existing synagogues."

Mr. Abitbol was born in Morocco. He is the first Sephardi Jew -- meaning, loosely, a Jew of Spanish, Portuguese, Near-Eastern, Middle-Eastern or North African heritage -- to become president of Federation CJA, an association long headed by Jews of Ashkenazi or Eastern European lineage.

France has the largest Sephardi community in the world after Israel, due mainly to a large influx into the Republic in the 1960s from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The same wave of immigration from North Africa, a wave that included Mr. Abitbol, fortified Montreal's Jewish community, where these Jews, fluent in French, arrived by the thousands in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, the French-speaking Sephardi community makes up about 25% of Montreal's Jewish community, where the mother tongue of the majority is still English, and most of the organizations are headed by English-speaking Ashkenazi Jews. But the greatest number of the French immigrants are Sephardi, says Eli Ben Chetrit, director of communications for the Communaute Sepharade du Quebec, and "this will be a gift, a strength for the French-speaking Jewish population here."

In a few years, it may also do something to tip the tradition balance of power in Jewish Montreal.

Like many French Jews considering immigration to Quebec, the Saadouns were alarmed last year when they heard that the library of the United Talmud Torah elementary school in Montreal had been firebombed.

But like many of their fellow French-Jewish immigrants to Montreal, they were pleased to see the immediate and hardline response on the part of the provincial and federal authorities and governments.

"In France, [firebombings] were common," says Valerie Saadoun. "And they went unnoticed by the authorities -- that was the scary thing. The silence."

"That bombing was in a way a sign to the French Jews thinking of coming here," says Ms. Ettinger. "That these things might happen, but they will remain isolated if Canada can help it. That here, hate crimes won't be tolerated, that racial disharmony is not like it is in France."

Ms. Matza says that in order for Quebec to keep it this way, the province has a lot of work to do. "There are 20,000 Muslims who will be immigrating to Quebec this year," she says. "Quebec must make an especial effort of welcoming this large, new population, and agencies such as the Jewish ones must make their own effort at amitie."

Ms. Matza says she has faith in the province of Quebec. "But in order to keep Quebec as wonderful a place as it is now," she says, "this province can look at what's happened in France, and take its lessons. The whole world can."

© National Post 2005