France wants Canada to extradite 56-year-old former University of Ottawa professor Hassan Diab, who they allege was involved in a terrorist bomb plot that killed four people and injured more than 40 others outside the Copernic synagogue in Paris on Oct. 3, 1980. His extradition hearing begins in Ottawa on Monday. Ottawa Citizen senior writer Chris Cobb went to Paris to learn more about the bombing, its aftermath and the investigation that eventually led French police to name Diab a suspect. In this, the first of a three-part series, he describes the devastating explosion and talks to survivors.
PARIS — The bomb outside the Rue Copernic synagogue exploded at 6:38 p.m.
It was Friday, Oct. 3, 1980, at the time celebrants and their children would normally have been milling about the sidewalk, wishing each other the best for the weekend before dispersing.
The bombers had done their homework.
Ten kilograms of the plastic explosive Semtex had been primed and packed in the saddlebag of a Suzuki motorcycle on the sidewalk.
The bomb was built to destroy and timed to kill.
It did both, but the four deaths and more than 40 injured must have disappointed the five terrorists who French police would later say took part in the plot.
Rabbi Michael Williams, a stickler for punctuality, had allowed the service to run over its usual time. Nobody could remember when that had ever happened before.
There were more than 300 people inside the synagogue, including 140 children, who were chattering excitedly as the rabbi, elders and older children handed out candies. It was Simhat Torah, one of the more joyous occasions on the Jewish calendar.
And then, minutes before the end of the service, the magnificent, 60-year-old glass ceiling suddenly shattered in shards and splinters.
There was no sound of an explosion, just the clattering of glass, the screaming of children and the groaning of bloodied adults in states of semi-consciousness.
“The glass came down on our heads,” recalls the English-born Williams, “and the door flew off its hinges. Then a ball of flame lit the synagogue. That was the petrol tanks of the cars exploding. “
Early confused thoughts were of gas leaks and earthquakes. But those old enough to remember the Second World War knew differently.
Lucien Finel, then the 50-year-old president of the synagogue, had been a member of the French resistance against the Nazis when he was 16. After the explosion, he emerged back into consciousness, cut and bloodied, his mind racing.
“During the war I planted bombs so I knew this was a bomb. It’s why it didn’t traumatize me as much as others.”
Finel flashed back to the day he saw his father dragged from his home by French police and, along with other members of his family and the Paris Jewish community, transported to Auschwitz concentration camp where they perished.
As he recovered from the initial shock, Finel’s first thought was that neo-Nazis were attacking the synagogue.
“I decided then we should be armed and fight back. What happened during the war was not going to happen again.”
Across the room, in an annex where the children typically sit, Isabelle Serfaty Bloch was 12 and terrified.
“I didn’t hear a sound,” she says, “I just saw the ceiling falling and shattering. People started screaming because they were hurt and bleeding. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t realize it was a bomb because I didn’t hear anything. The rabbi told us to stay inside.”
Eventually they were allowed to leave.
“We left very slowly because we were in shock,” adds Serfaty Bloch. “It was very quiet. We moved into the street and that’s where I saw dead people on the ground. It was dark because of the smoke. There was a car on fire.
“I didn’t look at the dead and injured people,” she adds. “I suppose it was self-preservation. But my friend Philippe was staring at them. He was in shock. I remember feeling like a grownup because I took his hand said ‘Come on, Philippe.’ And I pulled him out of the way.”
The explosion had killed four people outright. None of them had any connection with the now 100-year-old Union Liberale Israelite de France synagogue known by most as Copernic — a liberal house of prayer favoured by much of the Paris elite.
Jean-Michel Barbe was a chauffeur waiting for his boss who was inside the synagogue.
Hilario Lopez-Fernandez was a Portuguese labourer.
Philippe Bouissou, 22, was riding past on his motorcycle en route to his girlfriend’s house.
Aliza Shagrir, an Israeli mother of two young children, was on vacation, looking for a respite from terrorist tension at home. She was on her way to dinner with a friend.
Sixteen of the 42 injured were taken to hospital, among them Collette Barbier, who helped her husband Andre run the electrical store next door to the synagogue.
When the blast happened the Barbiers were in the store, along with their two sons, Gerald and Thierry, and four customers.
None was more than 10 metres from the bomb-laden Suzuki on the sidewalk.
The explosion ripped through the store, badly injuring Collette Barbier and a customer.
“My mother was completely covered in glass splinters,” recalls Gerald Barbier, now 58 and owner of the store. “It was days before we knew whether she would live or die.
“She had been facing a customer with her back to the street. My mother took it in the back, which protected the man’s body. But she is a small woman and the customer was much taller. He took it in the face. It was horrible.”
After firefighters had taken his mother to a nearby cafe to begin giving her blood transfusions, Gerald went outside to find his brother and father who were helping with the wounded.
“It was a scene of war, bodies and burning cars,” he says. “It was completely dark and there was fire in the street.”
Collette Barbier survived but at 83 remains scarred physically and emotionally.
“She never got over it,” says Gerald. “She still cries.”
The bomber had originally parked the Suzuki outside a gate at the side of the synagogue but as he was walking away, the gate opened and an irate motorist attempting to drive out demanded he move the motorcycle, which he did.
At the bottom of Copernic, at Victor Hugo Square, the terrorists had simulated a breakdown with their rented Citroen, blocking traffic. When he had parked the motorcycle for the second time, the bomber ran to the car and drove away.
Police figure that the release of blocked traffic onto Copernic was part of the plan to maximize casualties.
A couple of minutes of vanity saved Daniele Bloch’s life.
She arrived at the synagogue after her husband, who had taken their teenage children — Eric, 13, and 17-year-old Muriel — with him while she prepared dinner.
Daniele found a parking spot up the street and checked her hair in the rear view mirror. It was mussed and needed attention.
She did what was necessary, climbed out of the car, locked the door and walked towards the synagogue.
Then the bomb exploded.
“My only thought was to get into the synagogue because my children were in there. We have two entrances — the front door and an emergency entrance at the side. I still don’t know which door I used. I ran in and took the children.”
Bloch (no relation to Isabelle Serfaty Bloch) stuffed her children into the car and drove home at speed.
“The children were shocked into silence and just sat there,” she says. “I couldn’t think about anything except they are unhurt and I have them with me, alive. I sat down and watched TV and saw what had happened and I started to cry. How could this happen in France?
“And then I realized: I had left my husband behind.”
Claude Bloch smiles and says he considered filing for divorce but changed his mind. They have been married now for 52 years.
The Copernic terrorists might not have killed and maimed the numbers they had hoped for, but the shock waves from their bomb swept through France’s 600,000 Jews and into the country’s political establishment with a force nobody could have imagined.
And Copernic was just the beginning. A synagogue in Antwerp, Belgium, would be next, followed by a wave of more than 70 shootings and bombings against Jews and Jewish targets across Western Europe.
Rabbi Williams had eventually made his way to the street where he stayed for an hour or so, talking to the victims and, eventually, to the media.
“This is a disgrace to France,” a dark-bearded Williams ranted at the TV cameras.
It was, he says today, his shock at the scene of devastation he witnessed in the street outside and the realization that this was the first attack against Jews in France since the Second World War.
One vivid image remains.
“It was horrible to see that boy Philippe lying dead in the gutter,” he says. “He was just passing and took the blast full force. He was his parent’s only child and every year afterwards they came on Oct. 3 to put white flowers on the synagogue windowsill. It was very touching. But they’re both dead now.”
Leaving the charred wreckage that littered Rue Copernic that night, 12-year-old Isabelle Serfaty Bloch tried to make sense of it all.
“I felt that day that someone wanted to kill me,” she says. “Someone who did not know me wanted to kill me because I was a Jew — not because of who I was but only because of what I represented. That’s what really shocked me that day.”
