Paris
ParisReuters

A 20-year-old French-Jewish woman told police that two teenagers hurling anti-Semitic insults robbed and hit her on a main street of Paris suburb, JTA reported on Tuesday.

The woman said in her complaint to police that the incident happened on Monday in the heavily Jewish suburb of Sarcelles north of Paris, the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism (BNVCA) wrote in a statement Tuesday.

Prying her cellphone out of her hands, the two assailants, whom she said were black, hit her face while saying, “Are you afraid, you Jewess?” she told police.

A passerby intervened, allowing the woman to flee to her home with a broken nose and bloody face, the report said.

The incident occurred as the woman was on her way home from work, according to JTA. The two alleged assailants fled the scene. BNVCA called on police to investigate and apprehend the suspects.

Anti-Semitic acts in France rose by 69 percent in the first nine months of 2018, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said recently.

After a record year in 2015, anti-Semitic acts fell by 58 percent in 2016 and went down a further seven percent last year, however there was an increase in violent acts targeting Jews.

In recent years, France has seen several cases of extreme violence against Jewish victims whose attackers singled them out for robbery, rape and murder because they were Jewish.

In March, 85-year-old French Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was murdered in her apartment in Paris.

Prosecutors later indicted two defendants in connection with what is being tried as a murder with aggravated circumstances of a hate crime. They are also charged with robbery.

One of the suspects in custody, a 29-year-old Muslim man, was a neighbor of Knoll. Prosecutors investigating the murder have confirmed the two suspects in custody targeted her because she was Jewish.

Several days after Knoll’s murder, the office of the French Jewish Students Union at the University of Paris was broken into and vandalized with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic graffiti.

The same week, the French Jewish student union reported that a room that it used at the Sorbonne university in Paris had been completely defaced.

Last month, two Jews were assaulted in two separate incidents on the streets of Paris, in what police said may have been hate crimes.

In addition, worshipers that week discovered graffiti about Jews and “Palestine” written on the wall of a synagogue in Les Lilas, an eastern suburb of Paris bordering on the 19th District.

Also last month, the home of a Jewish mayor in Brumath, near Strasbourg, was covered with anti-Semitic graffiti.