The Chief Rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia, said Thursday that he had tested positive for Covid and therefore cannot accompany Emmanuel Macron to Algeria for his three-day official visit.
“I am asymptomatic. You had to do a PCR test to fly but for me, there were no issues. When I got the result, I was amazed,” explained to AFP the Chief Rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia, who was part of the official delegation of the Head of State, confirming information from RMC.
In the morning, Mr. Korsia had declined an invitation to radio RMC, after receiving the result of his test. Target of numerous insults on the networks in the past 48 hours, Mr. Korsia denied having been pressured not to go to Algeria. “Not only was there no pressure, but the president invited me, he maintained the invitation. Algeria gave my visa, Algeria wanted me to be there, so there has no problem,” he said on radio J.
He told AFP that he wanted to mention, especially during his visit to the Saint-Eugène cemetery in Algiers, where many French people born in Algeria are buried, the “expectation of many to be able to go to Algeria, to be able to go and collect on the graves of their ancestors”.
Son of Jews born in Algeria, Haïm Korsia wanted to “open up this possibility”, so that Algeria would not be “just a country that we talk about and that we cannot go and see”. This is the second time that Mr. Macron has visited Algeria as president, after a first visit in December 2017, at the very beginning of his first five-year term.
The relationship between France and Algeria, still very marked by 132 years of French colonization, was announced under the best auspices with the election of Mr. Macron, first resident of the Fifth Republic born after 1962.
But she soon stumbled upon a series of misunderstandings around this painful shared history. If he has multiplied unprecedented memorial gestures, Emmanuel Macron has not presented the apologies expected by Algiers.