In the midst of the five thousand people demonstrating in the streets of Strasbourg against anti-Semitism and for the Republic, on Sunday November 12, the city’s chief rabbi, Harold Abraham Weill, remained discreet. For the head of one of the oldest Jewish communities in France, this mobilization is not enough to forget the tensions of recent weeks, materialized by several anti-Semitic tags and acts.
For a month, the rabbi, aged 40, has been sailing between the fear and anguish which seizes the Jews of Strasbourg in the face of what is happening in Alsace and in Israel, to which they all feel close, and the gentleness of the birth, on October 5, of a new child – a little Hadassa, Esther in Hebrew. “The baby was two days old that morning,” remembers the rabbi, long curls placed behind his ears, black velvet yarmulke and dark frock coat folded behind his chair.
On October 7, while Hamas terrorists committed a terrifying massacre in Israel, the chief rabbi of Strasbourg, like all practicing Jews, woke up in the silence of a Shabbat Saturday. During this weekly rest which begins on Friday evening, several obligations punctuate religious life, in particular that of turning off all electrical devices, including portable ones. It was therefore upon arriving at the Saturday morning service, around 9 a.m., that Harold Abraham Weill learned what was happening from the CRS who were protecting the synagogue. “For the Bataclan, it’s the same, I learned that on Saturday morning; you imagine the extraterrestrial! “, explains the chief rabbi in office since 2017, sitting in his office at the synagogue.
It was built in the heart of the city in the 1950s to replace the old building on Quai Kléber, looted and burned by the Germans in 1940. On its monumental door is inscribed this quote from the book of Zacharie: “Stronger than the sword is my spirit. » Despite his young age, Harold Abraham Weill is not his first tragedy: “When you have experienced other attacks, you don’t react like everyone else; you feel a form of déjà vu that invades you,” says the man who was a very young rabbi in Toulouse, during the massacre perpetrated by Mohamed Merah at the Ozar Hatorah school, which left four dead in March 2012.
Propelled in front of the media
“I wasn’t even 29. Even if I don’t like to reduce the Jewish community of Toulouse or my time there to this memory, it’s true that I was thrown into the mix straight away. We had to manage investigations, autopsies, burials and, of course, families. The community’s anxiety was strong, people wanted to leave Toulouse. I have always been clear: France is our country, and whatever our attachment to Israel, we must stay. » He sees himself propelled in front of the media, finds himself facing President Nicolas Sarkozy, and gains twenty years of maturity at once.
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