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The Greene Line: The Perils of France

By Norman Greene
San Diego Jewish Press Heritage, January 3, 2003, page 18

Gex, France—There's a mezuzah on the front door and a picture of his bar mitzvah in the den where we are sleeping. Raphael is 15 and attending boarding school for the first time. It is a Catholic-run, strict boarding school. There are no Jewish boarding schools or day schools in this area of France.

Gex is a charming, rural border town of sorts, a bedroom community for Geneva, Switzerland. There may be Jewish schools in Geneva, but the French
Jews do not particularly care for Swiss Jews. Most of Raphael's friends are not Jewish.

Alain is a ruggedly handsome French man in his early forties. He is father to 8-year-old Lou, all young and innocent. His wife, Jane, is a successful
commercial interior designer with three children by her former marriage. They seem very happy together.

Alain is an employee of the largest Jewish-owned bank in Geneva. There are, I was told, at least three of them. He holds his position by virtue of the
fact that his wife is Jewish. Management is Lubavitch and very strictly Orthodox. The employee cafeteria is kosher.

Eric and Anne have yet to arrive on the scene. They are the proud parents of two adorable boys; each had a brit. Anne is very respectful of Eric's
religion and traditions. She fasts with him on Yom Kippur. She is devoted to him and they are happy together. They, like so many of the French, have not
bothered to marry, possibly because she is not Jewish and has not converted.

Melodie, Jane's eldest daughter, is an adorable 24-year-old who recently married 28-year-old Patrick. He proudly proclaims that he is 100 percent
Swiss. They had a civil marriage. Both work in Geneva and have that glow of newly-marrieds. They mix with the other cousins easily and seem to be
enjoying the marvelous French party cuisine. They plan to wait a year or so before starting a family.

Jovial Fabien is delightfully outgoing. No classic French reserve here. He and his Jewish wife have been separated for more than five years. He is
accompanied to this gathering by the love of his life — they have known each other since they were both 15 — and her adult children. Sabine is strikingly
attractive, warm, gracious, accomplished, amusing and not Jewish. They laugh easily together.

Our host and hostess are a lovely, hard-working Jewish couple. They each have demanding careers. They have built a beautiful four-bedroom, California
modern home with a magnificent glass wall in their huge living room that overlooks the Gex countryside and Geneva and offers views of snowcapped
Mount Blanc and the Jura Mountains, as well as clusters of village homes in the valley below. They have raised a Jewish family and strongly identify
with the liberal culturalism of our faith. They both have studied Hebrew and visited family in Israel many times. They are fearful for Israel and feel
personally wounded by the 9/11 assault on the World Trade Center and Western civilization. It is important for them to be Jewish. They hope for Jewish
continuity for their two children.

Upon our arrival, they gave us a handsome four-color, slick brochure concerning Jewish life and services in Geneva. It seems to contain mostly
information about fundraisers for ORT, Karen Hayessod, Magen David Adom and the Council of Swiss Jewish Affaires. There is one page in English about a Philip Roth book lecture. There are glossy pages of advertisements for Gucci, Bulgari, Hermes, Swiss banks, hotels and travel to Israel. The
advertising in this single issue alone would seem to be enough to sustain the weekly Heritage for six months. There are no obvious Jewish services in
Gex.

At the center of this family are the grandparents, Robert and Mary. They were both born in Egypt and expelled from their homeland two days after
their marriage in 1957 by Nasser after the failed French/English/Israeli attempt to recapture the nationalized Suez Canal. Although they could trace
their families back generations in Egypt for Mary and Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Poland for Robert, they both held French passports. Faced with the
immediate order to leave, they decided to emigrate to France at the time of the Egyptian expulsion. They arrived in Paris with only the clothes on their
backs and the help of the Jewish Agency.

Two of Robert's brothers fled to Mexico. Two of his sisters relocated in Israel. One brother became ultra-Orthodox in Brooklyn, where he has created
a dynasty of his own. "It is like another world to us," Robert said, "not at all like living in the United States or Paris." HIAS offered to relocate Robert and Mary in Texas or Ohio. Both were unacceptable to Mary. She preferred to stay in Paris. It took Robert two days to find a job. A year later, they began a French family of their own. They raised a daughter and two sons in Paris. They kept a kosher home. They were financially and socially successful. "Hard work paid off for us," theyseemed to imply.

Today, they have become very pragmatic about the state of French Jewry. "These are different times," Mary said with a bit of an apologetic smile.
"In Egypt, everyone married Jewish. You would not have dared to do otherwise. Today is different. You can only hope."

France has the largest population of Jews in Western Europe — some 600,000 in number. They have been politically marginalized by a series of
anti-Semitic governments, pro-Arab policies (there are more than five million Arabs in France) and fractious relations with Israel. While there
are strong Jewish institutions in the country, if this gathering is typical of French Jewish society, it seems clear that the current rate of
assimilation should be of growing concern to the well-being of future Jewish generations.

In this, France seems no different from the U.S.