Security Upgrade for Jews in Nice

By COLlive reporter

Six months after an ISIS terrorist plowed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd, killing 86 and wounding 434 people including five local Jews, special funds are being given to secure the Nice Jewish community against new threats.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (The Fellowship) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) will each be providing financial assistance, along with French Jewish organizations, for a series of security upgrades.

The funds are being given in response to requests from the Nice Jewish community since the attack and will set up security systems and materials, for local communal institutions.

“As we’ve unfortunately seen over the past few years, murderous terrorists are targeting Jews and so many others, from Mumbai to Nice, while Jewish communities are facing intensifying anti-Semitic threats and attacks,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, The Fellowship’s president and founder.

Since the end of World War II, the Nice Jewish community has grown from about 2,000 people to more than 25,000 today, and includes an Ashkenazi and Sephardi synagogue, 2 Chabad centers led by Rabbi Yossef Yitschok Pinson, a butcher, restaurants and a mikvah.

In 2016, The Fellowship helped fund nearly $100,000 in security upgrades at more than two dozen French-Jewish communal institutions, including schools and synagogues operated by Chabad in the wake of terror attacks in Paris, Toulouse and elsewhere.

The aid was part of more than $3.5 million in security funding that The Fellowship began providing to Jewish communities in 32 countries after the terror attacks in Mumbai against the Chabad center run by Rabbi Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg HY”D.

The funds, which were allocated to local institutions through the Jewish Agency, or directly to Chabad and others, helped fund security upgrades at community centers, schools, and synagogues across Asia, North Africa, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, and the FSU.

Last summer The Fellowship was helping 28 members of the Nice Jewish community to prepare to move to Israel, and was conducting an aliyah (immigrate to Israel) seminar only a few blocs from where the ISIS attack occurred.

In 2016, more than 2,800 Jews from Belgium and France immigrated to Israel with The Fellowship, part of the more than 4,500 Jews from 24 countries who made aliyah with The Fellowship in 2016.