JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Jewish Agency for Israel remembered the victims of anti-Semitic attacks outside of Israel at a ceremony in Jerusalem on Israel’s Memorial Day.
Wednesday’s memorial focused on the victims of the terror attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris in which four Jewish men were killed, and an attack on a Copenhagen synagogue that left a volunteer security guard dead.
Family members of the victims of the two attacks attended the ceremony at the Jewish Agency headquarters.
“We have discovered that the battlefield is not on the borders of Israel but in every Israeli city, and we furthermore discovered, once again, that the battlefield is not only on Israeli soil, but in every Jewish school and synagogue, and even in kosher supermarkets around the world,” Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky said at the ceremony.
“What protects us in Israel is conventional weapons: the power of the Israeli army. In the Diaspora, what protects us is an unconventional weapon: the solidarity of the Jewish people.”
Amedy Coulibaly, an Islamist, killed his Jewish victims at the Hyper Cacher market on the eastern edge of Paris during a daylong siege Jan. 9 and standoff with police. About a month later, the guard Dan Uzan was shot and killed outside the central Copenhagen shul, or Krystalgade Synagogue, by a lone Islamist gunman.
“My husband Phillipe was taken from me and from our children in the terrorist attack at Hyper Cacher in France. He was murdered for one reason: because he is a Jew,” said Valerie Braham, the widow of Philippe Braham. “The great hatred for the Jewish people entered my home and destroyed my family. It also touches every home and family in the Jewish people. Today we all feel the same pain.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
