Anti-Semitism in France (archive)
Anti-Semitism in France (archive)Reuters

A French watchdog is reporting that a 13-year-old Jewish boy from Paris was beaten and robbed outside his school by six men earlier this week.

According to the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic incident occurred on July 7 near the Gare du Nord train station in the French capital.

The organization said that the boy, who was not named, was followed by six men of African descent as he exited his school while wearing a kippah. One of the men shouted, “Take that, dirty Jew”, while the group was hitting the boy.

The boy’s cellular phone was stolen before the attackers fled the scene. The victim was taken to a local hospital where he received stitches to wounds on his head.

Vicious assaults against Jews in France have become a tragically common occurrence. In May, two Jewish residents of Paris were assaulted on a street in the city in the early afternoon by a gang of no less than 40 people.

A week before that attack, a French Jew was beaten as he left a synagogue in Paris. A watershed incident occurred in January when the kosher Hypercacher supermarket was taken hostage by an Islamist terrorist who murdered four Jews before being eliminated by police.

Nevertheless, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently released a study which found that the level of anti-Semitic attitudes among the general population in France showed a dramatic decline this year.

The study found that the number of those expressing anti-Semitic attitudes in France plummeted from 37 percent in 2014 to 17 percent in 2015.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)