The arrest in Canada of a man accused in one of Europe’s most shocking terrorist incidents is provoking a sense of relief and rekindling grim memories of the Friday evening in 1980 when a Sabbath service here was brutally interrupted.
Rabbi Michael Williams, in an interview Tuesday with Canwest News Service, remembers bowing his head in prayer with hundreds of worshippers before noticing something unusual.
“I remember thinking: ‘Well, that’s strange. It’s raining in the synagogue.’”
It was raining glass. The blast, from a bomb strapped on a motorcycle left outside the entrance, was so powerful it shattered the stained-glass portion of the ceiling above Williams.
Doors to the synagogue, located inside the building’s thick cement walls and large door that face narrow Rue Copernic near the Arc de Triomphe, were blown open before he and the worshippers actually heard the explosion.
“At the beginning we thought we’d carry on the service. You know how one has this kind of heroic pseudo-reaction. The hazzan (a lay person who leads the congregation in prayer) was an ex-Auschwitz (the Nazi extermination camp in Poland) man, and I’m a pretty combative Englishman, so we thought, ‘f- that, we’re going to carry on,’” he said.
“But about two minutes later we saw the flames and we saw people injured, so we left the synagogue and then we saw what you see in the photographs - cars overturned, a lot of fire.”
There were also four bodies - all passersby, one an Israeli Jewish woman and three non-Jews - and dozens injured.
Also left in the blast’s wake was a sense of public outrage which, according to Williams, played a role in France finally starting to come to terms in the 1990s with its anti-Semitic past.
The shock and anger was exacerbated at the time when the late economist Raymond Barre, the prime minister, said on television that the bomb was “aimed at Jews worshipping in a synagogue, but struck . . . innocent Frenchmen” on Rue Copernic.
“Without meaning to,” Time Magazine reported at the time, “Barre had implied that the Jews inside were neither completely French nor completely innocent.”
French authorities are attempting to extradite Hassan Diab, 54, an Ottawa university professor who lives in Gatineau, Que. He is wanted on counts of murder, attempted murder, and wilful destruction of property.
Diab is suspected of being linked at the time to Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a more radical splinter group that broke from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.
Diab, who is being held in an Ottawa detention centre pending his bail hearing Thursday, is a victim of a case of mistaken identity, according to his lawyer, Rene Duval.
In France, the reaction after an initial flurry of media coverage late last week, hasn’t been particularly powerful.
Serge Cwajgenbaum, the Paris-based secretary-general of the European Jewish Congress, said there’s a feeling of relief among those in France’s 350,000-person Jewish community who remember the incident.
“The community certainly welcomes the arrest of a man who is suspected to be the responsible person for the murdering and killing of innocent people.”
But Rabbi Williams, 64, said too much time has passed for France’s Jews to be emotional over the arrest.
“It would have been (a reaction of) ‘thank God!’ if it happened six months or a year or two years later. But 28 years is an awfully long time.”
While Cwajgenbaum said the community believes the police have found the man responsible, Williams isn’t so sure.
“It’s very good to have closure, if there is closure,” Williams said.
“Who knows? He may be innocent; they may have even got the wrong man.”
And public interest in the case could be stifled further because of possible delays in the extradition.
The newspaper Le Figaro, noting that Canada’s justice system is “very independent” from political power compared to France, reported last week that extradition could take months or years. Other French media have reported that the process could take weeks.
Lawyers familiar with Canada’s extradition process supported that assertion Tuesday.
“An extradition process, especially when so many years have passed since the offence, can be complicated and prolonged,” Toronto lawyer Joseph Neuberger said in an e-mail Tuesday.
“In this case, there will be significant issues with the quality of the evidence presented to support extradition and as a defence lawyer, there are many arguments that the defence can advance.”
The terror attack, the first deadly attack against a Jewish institution in France since the end of the Second World War, was originally suspected of being the work of fascist terrorists.
Outrage over the incident - exacerbated by Barre’s comment - resulted in a mass street demonstration involving more than 150,000 people - including union members and activists from a range of political parties.
But the investigation went nowhere, and talk of a possible suspect only emerged after Nicolas Sarkozy became president last year.
Rabbi Williams said the police, remarkably, never set foot in his synagogue until earlier this year to ask questions and seek evidence about the incident.
While the reaction is muted, Williams said the incident’s impact left a legacy. The community’s heightened militancy played a role, he said, in the pressure that resulted more than a decade later in France officially acknowledging the French state’s role in the deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps.
“It shook people out of their lethargy.”
