25
ISRAEL WAS STILL A GREAT PLACE TO BE YOUNG, AND WHEN the Six-Day War was over, the demonstrations and fundraising finished, Daniel Altmann went back to his northern kibbutz. Palestinian children would occasionally throw a rock, but you could still have fun. A group of friends from the kibbutz volunteered for an archaeological dig in the Greek Orthodox sector of Jerusalem. Digging in the bottom of a pit, they found oil lamps, not all of which they turned over to the archaeologist. In addition to these souvenirs they would save small shards of pottery that were of no archaeological value and sell them by the kilo to Arab merchants, who ground them up and made “oil lamps from the time of Herod” to sell to tourists.
But the Altmanns did not raise their children just to have fun, and so Daniel returned to Paris, where he attended the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Science Studies, “Sciences-Po.” In this leading university he met many of the Jewish intellectuals who a decade later would emerge as key figures in the Socialist government of Sciences-Po graduate Francois Mitterrand. Daniel then attended an elite officers’ school and afterward, served as an officer in Berlin. For major holidays he would go to a West Berlin synagogue that was packed with American soldiers. After a two-year tour as a French officer, he joined the family steel business in northern France, where he had no contact at all with Judaism.
He had never lived much of a Jewish life, but in Valenciennes, a town near the Belgian border—where, for the first time, he was completely cut off from other Jews—a question came to him: “Am I a Jew or not?” It seemed to him, at 26, that he had to make a choice. He had behind him the whole history of the Blums, the Levys, and the Altmanns. He thought about his great-grandfather, who had believed he was an established businessman until the Dreyfus case forced him to flee; about his grandfather, who lived the good life in Paris until the Nazis came and he had to sell his business; about his uncle, who was deported despite his changed name; and about the way his parents had raised him and his two sisters to be affluent Parisians who only occasionally entertained the idea of Jewishness. You can't be a little bit Jewish, can you? Aren't you either Jewish or not Jewish? Isn't that what we had all discovered by accident?
Daniel became active in Jewish fundraising activities, and soon he was president of a group called New Leadership, an organization of people like him—young Jews from wealthy families working to raise money for Israel. Daniel organized visits to Israel, going back himself several times. More than fun and funny pottery, this work had become a way for him to feel Jewish, feel involved with Jewish life. But did giving money, raising funds, mean being involved in Judaism? He was still troubled, and one day at a Jewish wedding he began talking about this to a man he met. The man said, “Listen, if you want to search a bit, call me.”
Altmann began spending one night a week studying the Mish-nah, the first part of the Talmud. After a year his teacher said he needed a more advanced teacher and sent him to Rue Pavee, to the dank and moldy building next to the Rue Pavee synagogue where Chaim Rottenberg and his wife Rifka lived. On the top floor, in a large threadbare room with worn floorboards, Rav Rottenberg taught a small group of men on Thursday nights. They were the people he had somehow grabbed to join his fast-growing community.
In 1978, the year that Altmann met him, Rottenberg was still a man of boundless energy, a rigorous, uncompromising enforcer. Before Passover that year, he had gone to Strasbourg to inspect the matzoh makers, storming into the factory in his black coat, asking questions, looking around, making sure the matzoh was baked in no more than eighteen minutes because, it is thought, leavening could take place if it were baked any longer. The matzoh dough was being mixed in a huge vat, and Rottenberg had to climb up a ladder to peer in and make sure everything looked kosher and chametz free. Preoccupied by the inspection, he lost his balance and fell off the ladder.
To Rifka, this was the fatal fall, the fall from the matzoh vat, somehow God's will. In truth, the doctors examining him after the accident discovered he was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Thereafter he slowly weakened.
It took four years of study to turn Daniel Altmann, the wealthy assimilated Parisian, into a devout Orthodox Jew. He decided to marry and start a traditional family. Not exactly like Levy Kohane, who had never been in the company of a girl, thirty-year-old Altmann went to the synagogue, to the study group, the cheder, and asked for a suitable woman to marry. The community found him Lynda Abitan, a woman from a deeply religious Marrakesh family. Lynda's father had died when she was very young, and her mother had raised six children by herself, working in a factory, making sure they were all religious and well married. Lynda was the outspoken, independent, and still-unmarried one. Her mother was beginning to worry about her. She was religious, but she just didn't seem to be conforming to the Orthodox mold.
Thirteen years had passed since Lazare Bouaziz married Suzy Ewenczyk. More than half the Sephardic marriages were now with Ashkenazim, and it was no longer an issue that was given great importance. French Jewry had a Sephardic majority that had strongly colored the community and was thoroughly blending with it. The two groups were no longer distinct. In January 1981, the same year that Altmann married Lynda Abitan, Rene Sirat became the first North African Grand Rabbi of France. Much was made in the general press of the fact that this ruling Ashkenazic bastion was now falling to the Sephardim, as though the struggle for control of the community had been won by the North Africans. But Sirat's first official act the day he became Grand Rabbi was to go to the Soviet embassy and request a visa to visit Soviet Jews. The application was denied, but Sirat continued to apply pressure on the Soviets and to make sure that French Jewry did not forget about the struggle of Jews in the Soviet Union. Given the numbers and activism of Sephardic rabbis, it may be a long time before there is another Ashkenazic Grand Rabbi, but the ascent of Sirat may also have been the last time anyone would ever give it a thought. Even separate congregations were becoming increasingly rare.
The Altmanns were not concerned that Daniel was marrying a Sephardi, and in fact they greatly admired Lynda's mother as a tough, hard-working, industrious woman. One of Daniel's sisters had also married a Moroccan, and no one had seen that match as an issue. But after ten years, when that marriage failed, even happily married Daniel suspected that differences between Ashke-nazim and Sephardim were to blame. “Matching an Ashkenazic woman with a Sephardic man is a big problem,” he observed.
In 1981 the issue between the Altmanns and the Abitans was not Sephardim versus Ashkenazim. It was assimilation. Lynda was already a little wild, and it was worrisome to her deeply religious mother to see her marrying into this bourgeois French family. Even though Daniel had studied hard and had turned traditional, they worried about it lasting. Lynda's mother loved the Rue Pavee synagogue, because she claimed it was the only one in Paris that had never committed the outrage of having organ music. The other Altmanns rarely went to any synagogue at all. When they did, it was to the “liberal” synagogue on Rue Copernic, over in their expensive sixteenth arrondissement. At Copernic it was not just the music that was untraditional; there was not even separate seating for men and women.
The Altmanns had been eager for their son to get married. He had been “fooling around” for long enough. But his marriage to Lynda Abitan exposed them to a strange world that they did not like. They had tried not to say too much when their son grew a beard and started studying. But it was not until Daniel's wedding that they saw what his new world was really like. At the wedding not only did men and women sit apart, they did not even touch. They did not even dance together. Instead, Daniel would dance with the other bearded men while the women were off in another corner. What century was this all from? Modern successful Jews did not act like this. Who had influenced him? Who had changed him? Was he really going to live like strange oppressed people from some faraway backward country?
TO LIVE A TRADITIONAL JEWISH LIFE means to live in a community centered around a rabbi and a synagogue that has to be within walking distance. But to live within walking distance of Rue Pavee was increasingly difficult. The Marais was getting refurbished. New museums were opening to draw tourists. Bit by bit, the old buildings that used to be propped up with thick timbers running into the narrow streets were getting reconstructed, resurfaced, carefully divided into apartments and sold for prices previously unknown in eastern Paris. The city had timed the Marais renovation well, and the buildings were becoming ready just as real estate prices were starting to rapidly inflate. It had closed the central market, Les Halles, and the entire historical center was being reworked. The Marais was no longer a working-class, commercial area. There was no longer a lively market to drift toward late at night. The working-class residents were being moved to the suburbs, while the buildings that had been working-class tenements for centuries were being turned into luxury apartments. The official claim was that the original tenants would be given opportunities to move back to their old neighborhood. But working-class people did not want to move into a deluxe neighborhood that offered high prices and few jobs.
The Altmanns —Daniel and Lynda—were not working-class people, and they could afford to live in the Marais, buying a large, two-floor apartment with a terrace a few minutes away from the synagogue. There was enough space to comfortably raise a large family. But most of the fifty families that belonged to Rottenberg's community were not wealthy international businessmen and had to find apartments ever farther away. Many had to walk forty min-ules or an hour to attend Sabbath services on Rue Pavee.
The Pletzl, too, was being shaved away. It was now no more than Rue des Rosiers, Rue des Ecouffes, and Rue Pavee. It was becoming a curiosity for tourists, mentioned in guidebooks. You could buy a little pastry at Finkelsztajn's or some Sephardic treats from the Journos”. Or you could have lunch at Jo Goldenberg's, which had been one of the last surviving steamy one-room eateries in the Pletzl but was now expanded and cleaned up for foreign visitors.
Like many of the old Pletzl generation, Icchok Finkelsztajn had left for a better neighborhood before the renovation had gotten under way. It was this migration of the old working class that had opened up much of the property to renovation. In 1971, Icchok retired, and he and Dwojra moved to the north of the city behind Montmartre, where for a reasonable price they could rent a more spacious apartment in a nineteenth-century building that was not collapsing. In 1974, Leah Korcarz died, and the blue-tiled bakery on the corner of Rue des Ecouffes was sold out of the Finkelsztajn family. Henri, who had taken over his father's bakery, was the only family member still in the Pletzl, although he and his wife also now lived away from the crowded center. The apartment above the bakery could be used as an additional work space, making it possible to expand the offerings of foods to keep pace with the Journos across the street.
DURING THE 1970s, France experienced a fashion called “forties revival/’ Once De Gaulle and his official version of World War II faded from power, there was a great burst of interest in what had taken place in France during the war. Books were being written and movies produced. Film director Marcel Ophuls made The Sorrow and the Piry, a television documentary on daily life during the war in the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. The soon-to-be president of France, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, happened to be from that region, and his family happened to be among many that the film showed in various degrees of collaboration and acquiescence. While the film was a sensation in New York, it never made it on to French television, which was state-controlled, until a decade later, when Giscard was defeated by Francois Mitterrand.
The more French people looked into the 1940s, the more toxic the atmosphere became. In 1978 a journalist for UExpress went to Spain to interview Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the one-time head of Vichy's Office for Jewish Affairs. Darquier told UExpress that “only lice were gassed at Auschwitz.” He then proceeded to deny that there had been a Holocaust. This was the same year that, while the Institute for Historical Review was coming into being in California, a crackpot professor in Lyons named Robert Faurisson started attracting attention by making outrageous statements. He was to become one of the most publicized of the Holocaust revisionists.
There were more serious problems than this in daily life. Attacks against both immigrants and Jews were becoming increasingly common. In 1975 there was an explosion in a synagogue near Rue Bleue. The following year, several organizations that monitored anti-Semitism were attacked. In 1977 anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish sites noticeably increased, and several leaders were attacked. The rhythm of these attacks seemed to accelerate. In 1979 a Molo-tov cocktail was thrown at a synagogue, and a Jewish leftist, Pierre Goldman, was openly assassinated. In March a bomb went off in a Paris student's kosher restaurant at lunchtime, wounding dozens. The next month a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the door of a Jewish hostel. In September one of the Paris stores of Daniel Hechter, a Jewish clothing designer, was bombed. In November firebombs were thrown at a Strasbourg synagogue.
Nineteen eighty was even worse. A synagogue in the Marne was attacked in April. In May an organization for deportees and Resistance fighters was hit. In September a Jewish business was set on fire. A few days later, automatic weapons were fired on the central synagogue, a Jewish day care center, the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, and a school.
On Friday, October 3, at 7:30, when the evening Sabbath service should have been ending, a bomb exploded in front of the Rue Copernic synagogue. Because the service had run a little late, there were fewer fatalities than planned. Still, more than twenty people were injured, including some inside the synagogue. Four people who had happened down the short street at the time were killed. One of them, by coincidence, was an Israeli tourist. The others were non-Jews. French Prime Minister Raymond Barre was quick to denounce “this odious attack which was intended for Jews on their way to the synagogue and which struck innocent Frenchmen crossing the street.”
Was not this statement a symptom of one of the problems? A government which distinguished between Jews and innocent Frenchmen? The Jewish community had had enough. A huge demonstration was quickly organized with the labor unions and opposition political parties. Some 300,000 people marched against racism and anti-Semitism. Some estimates of the crowd were as high as 500,000. The wide, long boulevard that extends from Re-publique to Bastille was filled.
An hour after the explosion, a telephone call claimed authorship ol the attack for a small neo-Nazi group called Federation d'Action Nationalists Europeenne, commonly known as FANE. The organization was officially banned one month later, which in practical terms only meant that it had to change its name. In Belgium and West Germany there were similar laws, and neo-Nazis had become skilled at running a variety of organizations and quickly turning one that was banned into another. The Flemish Military Organization, after being banned in 1983, became the Flemish Bloc. In Germany the Aktionsfront Nationaler Sozialisten was banned and became the Nationale Sammlung, which was banned and became the Deutsche Alternative. Year after year, the same people showed up at Diksmuide with different names for their organizations. The year after the French government banned FANE, the FANE activists were at Diksmuide under the name FNE. A mere inconvenience for the neo-Nazis, the name changes created total confusion for law enforcement.
The police investigation could not show who had planted the bomb at the Rue Copernic synagogue. Accusations landed all over the political spectrum. Extreme right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen accused the KGB. Arabs and Basques came under suspicion. Increasingly, so did the French police, recalling that Pierre Goldman's unsolved murder was claimed by a group called “Honor of the Police.” A police union official, Jose Deltorn, asserted that he knew of thirty police officers who were active in extreme right-wing organizations, including FANE. But when the government challenged him, he was discredited because he could prove that only nineteen of these policemen were neo-Nazis.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front was becoming better organized. There was also something called the New Right, which was supposed to be highly intellectual. A popular newspaper magazine, Le Figaro, published articles in their Sunday magazine about biological determinism and the inherent inferiority and superiority of certain peoples. Le Figaro is published by France's leading press baron, Robert Hersant, who had gotten his start contributing to the collaborationist press of Vichy France.
Middle East politics was also a factor in Europe's increasingly dangerous atmosphere. In 1977 the Labour party lost the Israeli elections, and power passed to Menachem Begin, a man who had previously been labeled a disreputable terrorist because of his war against the British Mandate and his extremist view on Palestinians. Begin's rise divided Jewish opinion. Aaron Waks in Dusseldorf cheered Begin's victory, but his two sons in Israel were appalled. The idea of a disreputable right-wing extremist as Israeli prime minister made the European leftist press even more sympathetic to the Palestinians, but an overall impression that the world was turning against Israel had already contributed to the rise of Israeli hardliners. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving official sanction to a favorite European line of anti-Semitism. The resolution, in language that was very familiar in Central Europe, declared that Zionism was a form of racism. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, after committing numerous acts of terrorism, denounced the future use of terrorism and was accorded head-of-government status by the United Nations.
UNDER GISCARD D‘ESTAING, French foreign policy became overtly pro-Arab. The PLO was permitted to open an office in Paris, Between 1973 and 1980 the price of oil went from $3 a barrel to more than $38, and undeveloped Arab nations were awash in cash that they were ready to spend on arms and other projects. Among the lucrative contracts France grabbed was one for a nuclear reactor for Iraq. The radical Arab nations also had money to finance small Palestinian breakaway groups that rejected Arafat's newly moderate position. It had been one such group that had sent Nasser Al-Saied to Antwerp.
But the Jews of France were worried about Nazis, not Arabs. That was who history had conditioned them to fear. Even if the Copernic investigation was pointing toward the Middle East, it was clear that fascists were becoming increasingly active in France, and now at last, French people were united as never before against them. At last pressure was being put on a government that was so indifferent to right-wing extremism that President Giscard d'Estaing had not even interrupted his hunting weekend when news of the fatal synagogue bombing broke.
The only group that ever claimed responsibility for the attack was FANE, in a telephone call made by a bodyguard named Jean-Yves Pellay. Pellay was a giant with close-cropped gray hair, a scar on his forehead, and a menacing grin with one tooth missing. He had a nervous twitch that caused him to blink both eyes tightly closed so that he always looked as if he were trying to make sure he was awake. At the time he was only 28 years old.
Curiously, Pellay had been arrested in January 1980 for illegal possession of a firearm. He had been held for three months, during which time he was regularly questioned about which policemen were involved with FANE. This was nine months before the bombing and Jose Deltorn's accusation against the police.
Warily looking around a cafe one year after the bombing, Pellay whispered a strange story of a Jewish mother and time he had spent in Israel and then in service with the French Foreign Legion. In F'aris he had been approached by a small radical Jewish group that wanted him to infiltrate FANE. While he was providing the neo-Nazis with paramilitary training, he was passing on information to the Jewish group. He said that he made the telephone call claiming the synagogue bombing for FANE not at the request of FANE but at the request of his Jewish contacts. This was confirmed by the contacts. A few more established Jewish figures also confirmed that they were involved in the recruiting and use of Pellay as a double agent. Involved in monitoring and reporting on the extreme right, they wanted the government to move against FANE. They were not concerned about obstructing the police's search for the real perpetrators, because they reasoned that the police investigation would lead nowhere. The French police never solved these cases. In time the Israeli secret service would solve it, and in the meantime they would have forced law enforcement to mobilize against the extreme right.
As predicted, the French never solved the case, but in 1984 the Israeli secret service identified the Rue Copernic bombers as a dissident faction of George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
AUGUST IS Paris's quietest month. It is the month favored by Parisians for their month-long vacation. The only shops and restaurants that remain open are the ones trying to catch August tourists. In the old days this didn't have much to do with the Pletzl, since the poor immigrants who lived there had nowhere to go. But by the 1980s, even Rue des Rosiers closed down in August, except for Goldenberg's, whose business had become largely with tourists visiting the newly discovered Marais. At the height of the lunchtime rush on August 9, 1982, two men walked into Goldenberg's with Polish-made automatic pistols, and as staff and customers dove under tables and crawled behind counters, they sprayed bullets, systematically working from the cashier's counter along the bar to the tables, and even into the kitchen, where they shot a cook. Then, with the confidence of professionals, they backed out, still firing, and worked their way down Rue des Rosiers, walking calmly behind a white getaway car being driven by an accomplice while they watched doorways and windows and fired at anyone who appeared.
Finkelsztajn's was closed for the month of August, but Henri was in the shop, seated behind the counter watching television. He heard small explosions, and since the shades were down on the storefront windows, he wondered what was going on in the street. He got up and went to the door and then realized it was probably just kids with firecrackers left over from Bastille Day. And so he went back to his seat behind the counter instead of walking outside into the automatic pistols of the two men, who were now in front of his store deciding whether to continue on Rue des Rosiers or turn up Rue des Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais. They took the smaller street past the Journos and fired on a cafe before vanishing from the neighborhood.
A few minutes later, a bulletin appeared on television that there had been an attack on Rue des Rosiers. When Henri Finkelsztajn opened his door, people were running down the street. He walked down to where a crowd had gathered in front of Goldenberg's. There was blood on the ground, and people were wailing and shouting. Six people were dead and twenty-one wounded. Eighty spent bullets were found in the restaurant. A young Arab whose father, a longtime Goldenberg employee, had been killed was sobbing uncontrollably. The Algerian who now ran the cafe in the space next to Finkelsztajn was there. Andre Journo, who had taken to smoking large Cuban cigars, turned up and was making strong angry statements to journalists. Pletzl people stayed in the street all afternoon and argued about the Nazis and the PLO, which still had a Paris office, and the government and the police.
When Finkelsztajn went home, he turned on the television news, which reported that young Jews had come to Rue des Rosiers and shouted anti-Arab slogans in a demonstration. Finkelsztajn had not seen Jews shouting anti-Arab slogans. There was no logic to it, since some of the victims were Arab and the neighborhood was increasingly mixed. He angrily telephoned the television station, France-3, told them who he was, and said that he had been there all day and there had been no such demonstration. It was explained to him that nevertheless the story was true, because a reporter had been there. Finkelsztajn was furious. There was no Arab-Jewish problem in the Pletzl—the press was inventing one.
Mitterrand, the newly elected president, demonstrating the difference between himself and his predecessor, spoke at a memorial service at the Rue Pavee synagogue. But once again the French police could not find the attackers. Goldenberg stayed open the rest of the summer, but only a few friends or an occasional reporter came. No one wanted to eat lunch there. One Jewish woman went there to eat lunch at the counter out of defiance. “It's disgraceful. Disgraceful,” she said. “People have to come here to show them. Otherwise they have won.”
Goldenberg sat in one of the red-upholstered booths looking defeated. He had been born on Rue des Rosiers in 1923. Three years later, his father, who came from Odessa by way of Turkey, had opened the little restaurant. In 1943, Jo Goldenberg came home late one day just in time to see the police take away both his parents and two younger sisters. They were all killed in Auschwitz. Now Goldenberg thought about how he seemed to always miraculously escape, always arrive a moment later. He had missed this attack, too, coming in fifteen minutes later. He preserved the window with the bullet holes just where it was and erected a plaque to the six victims. It was decided that the anniversary, August 9, should become a Pletzl event. “We must commemorate August 9 every year,” Andre Journo would say solemnly whenever a journalist showed up.
Angry young Jewish men, some armed, some only claiming to be, began to patrol the Pletzl, stopping people, demanding identification, asking questions. They were often rude and abrasive, a belligerent amateur burlesque of tough cops. They were not going to leave the safety of Jews in the hands of the French police any longer, and their deliberately exaggerated demeanor was to advertise the point that the Jews here on this street, where the police had quietly gathered up a previous generation forty years earlier, were no longer going to be the way they used to be.
A YEAR BEFORE the Goldenberg attack, two people had been killed and seventeen wounded when a grenade and automatic pistols were turned on a Vienna synagogue. The same type of W Z-63 Polish automatic pistol had been used and traced to a Palestinian dissident group led by Abou Nidal. Although this group and that of Arafat were bitter enemies, the Vienna Jewish Community angrily blamed the Bruno Kreisky government for its friendly relations with the PLO. They believed that Kreisky, who happened himself to be Jewish, inadvertently encouraged terrorism.
Three months after the Goldenberg attack, a bomb exploded in front of a synagogue in the Antwerp diamond district. Once again, the attackers had completely misread their target. They imagined that a synagogue in the heart of the diamond district, the only nonmodern building in that little hook of streets behind the Pelikaanstraat, would be a direct hit on the Jewish establishment. In fact, the synagogue has little to do with the diamond district and serves the small Sephardic community. The bomb was placed there on the morning of Simchat Torah, a holiday which celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings, when all of the Torahs are removed from the arc and carried around the synagogue to the accompaniment of singing and dancing. Children join in, carrying candles and little flags. The next morning, the celebration is repeated. But because in Antwerp Jews tend to be excessive about these events, the night before they had danced late into the night. Realizing that they would have only a few hours to sleep, they postponed the nine o'clock morning service to nine-thirty. The bomb went off at nine-fifteen, blowing out the metal and glass facades of the diamond district and killing three and wounding 106 people, all of them non-Jews. The Jews who worked in diamonds were all in synagogues outside of the diamond district.
The bloodshed continued around Europe. Another man armed with an automatic pistol opened fire on the entrance to a Brussels synagogue during Rosh Hashanah services in September 1982. A few weeks later, as a crowd was leaving a Rome synagogue at the end of Sabbath morning services, assailants tossed hand grenades and opened fire with machine guns, killing a two-year-old boy and wounding thirty others. The Chief Rabbi of Rome charged that such attacks had been encouraged by the Italian government's welcoming Yasser Arafat on a recent visit.
But the Palestinians were not the only problem. Even if an attack such as the one on Goldenberg's showed every sign of Palestinian work, the assailants clearly had their European admirers. Mysteriously, mimeographed flyers appeared around Amsterdam saying in Dutch, “In the heart of Paris freedom fighters have done a brave act.” The statement attributed the attack to French “Nationalists… nauseated by the fact that there are Jews in the Red French govern-in ent. Fiterman, a real French name isn't it?” Charles Fiterman, a Jewish Communist, was the minister of transportation in the new leftist French government that had come to power in 1981.
Two of the bloodiest incidents of the period—the 1980 bombings of the Bologna train station, killing eighty-five, and the Munich Oktoberfest, killing 13—were both attributed to the extreme right. The Munich bombing was traced to a “martial sports group” led by Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. Shortly before the bombing, former Bavarian Prime Minister Franz-Josef Strauss had been quoted describing the group as people who were picked on for doing nothing more than spending their Sundays hiking. Many leaders of the German extreme right spent time in Hoffmann's sports camp. Hoffmann was released for lack of evidence in the Oktoberfest case, and after his sports group was banned, he became involved with the PLO and for a time centered his activities in Lebanon.
In France alone, between 1977 and 1981, 290 violent acts were attributed to the extreme right. A 1981 West German government report claimed there were 200,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, but that “only” 3,000 were armed and ready to commit violence. In March 1981 the Sinus Institute, a West German pollster commissioned by the chancellor's office, found that 13 percent of the West German electorate—some five and a half million West Germans—held extreme right-wing political views. These views included hatred of foreign minorities and hatred of democracy and a reverence for what in German is called Volk, Germans as a racial entity. Almost half of these extremists said they approved of the use of violence.
Throughout Western Europe, verbal and physical attacks on immigrants became increasingly common in the early 1980s. The Germans, as is the habit of their culture, invented a word for hostility to foreigners, Ausldnderfeindlichkeit. The neo-Nazi groups that had emerged in Germany in 1960 declined in the 1970s, but by 1980, they were larger and more active than ever before. As in France, the West German police seldom arrested right-wing extremists. On the other hand, in June 1983, when ten thousand people turned out to protest a planned rally of two hundred neo-Nazis in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin, the police moved in with clubs and tear gas, and a pitched battle ensued in which 203 anti-Nazis were arrested. “Ausldnder ins KZ”—foreigners to the concentration camp—became a common graffiti slogan. “Foreigners out!” in various languages was becoming a common slogan throughout Western Europe. What was no longer common anywhere in Western Europe was an unguarded synagogue or Jewish institution. A Jew looking for a Sabbath service needed only look for the armed guards strolling in the street.
FOR THE FIRST YEAR anniversary of the Goldenberg attack, French television did a special documentary interviewing Jo Goldenberg and other people in the Pletzl. Andre Journo eagerly took his turn to explain his theory of how defeated President Valery Giscard d'Estaing had been behind the attack. Henri Finkelsztajn, whose schoolboy stutter occasionally flared, was not eager to make such media appearances, but he was still angry. After the attack the people of the Pletzl—Arabs, Jews, Christians, even some gypsies— were scared and worried and had spent that afternoon together talking, but no one had chanted anti-Arab slogans. This had to be made clear to the public.
With the camera running and lights so bright that his little bakery looked twice its size, Finkelsztajn found himself face to face with the old lines. He was asked if he was a Frenchmen. If so, why did he call himself a Jew? There was no stutter. Finkelsztajn, the high school drop-out, had a smile of wisdom and eyes that seemed to be winking as he explained, “I say I am a Jew because we are in France. When I am abroad, I say I am a Frenchman.”
The interviewer, not content with this, pointed out that he was a Polish Jew. Henri, with the patience of a man who has spent a lifetime answering the same needless question, explained that he had never been to Poland, had had no contact with the country nor the slightest feelings for the place. Then he smiled his pleasant, amused smile—the same smile you get after buying one of his challahs.