President Emmanuel Macron on Monday, November 13, hosted religious leaders for talks on combatting anti-Semitism in France, a day after a Paris march rallied tens of thousands to express anxiety over an upsurge in acts against Jews.
The talks were a "continuation of the appeal for national unity and brotherhood" Macron, who did not attend Sunday's rally, his office said. In a letter published on Saturday in the newspaper Le Parisien, Macron wrote that "a France where our Jewish fellow citizens are afraid is not France," calling on people to rally around the country's "values" and "universalism."
Over 180,000 people turned out across France on Sunday according to police figures, 105,000 of them in Paris, to join marches "for the republic and against anti-Semitism." Macron himself has been criticized for staying away from the march.
The country has seen an upsurge in anti-Semitic acts since Hamas's bloody October 7 attack on Israel killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and Israel's response in the Gaza Strip, which the Hamas-run health ministry says has claimed more than 11,000 lives, mostly civilians and many of them children.
While the presidency did not specify who had been invited to Monday's meeting, France's chief rabbi Haïm Korsia, Catholic bishops' conference head Eric de Moulins-Beaufort and rector of the Paris Grand Mosque Chems-Eddine Hafiz were all present. Leaders from other faiths including the Orthodox church, Buddhism and Protestantism were also in attendance.