French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday condemned the murder of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll in Paris, calling it “appalling” and vowing to fight anti-Semitism.
“I am deeply affected by the appalling crime committed against Mrs. Knoll. I reaffirm my resolute determination to fight against anti-Semitism,” Macron wrote on Twitter, according to JTA.
Knoll’s torched body was found with 11 stab wounds inside her apartment last week.
Prosecutors on Monday indicted two defendants, including one of her neighbors, in connection with what is being tried as a murder with aggravated circumstances of a hate crime. They are also charged with robbery.
Knoll’s murder occurred as France's half-a-million-plus Jewish community has voiced increasing concern over a rise in violent anti-Semitic acts.
Last month, a judge confirmed that the April 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman who was beaten and thrown out of her window was indeed motivated by anti-Semitism.
In January, an eight-year-old boy wearing a kippah was assaulted as he was walking to a tutor in the Sarcelles suburb of Paris. Two assailants, about 15 years old, knocked him to the ground and beat him.
That same month, a 15-year-old Jewish girl was slashed in the face while walking home from school, wearing the uniform of her Jewish private school.
Earlier in January, two kosher shops in Creteil, another suburb of Paris, were torched. That incident occurred two weeks after the same shops were attacked by individuals who painted swastikas on their facades.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe recently warned his country is facing a “new form of anti-Semitism” marked by violence.
To fight something, one must have “the courage to put a name on it ... to acknowledge that, yes, there is a new form of anti-Semitism, violent and brutal, emerging more and more openly in our land,” he said.