French rabbis Tuesday called for a “Jewish response” to the murders of a rabbi and three children in Toulouse, and called for justice and for building more schools, synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
"This act of barbarity and murder will be met with a Jewish response," said Rabbi Aryeh Goldberg, Deputy Director of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe and quoted by the European Jewish Press.
"We will bury the dead, look after the injured, and we will demand justice is pursued through the appropriate channels, said the rabbi.
"This attack is an attack on the whole Jewish community,” he added. “We feel the pain of the families who have lost loved ones and as a community we will show our reaction. If there are people who want to scare the Jewish community into submission, our response will be to show them that we will not be bowed, the opposite is true.
He said that building more Jewish institutions “is the Jewish response."
France observed a one-minute silence in its schools Tuesday morning as the country still reels from the gruesome murders of Rabbi Yonatan Sandler, his two sons and the eight-year-old daughter of the administrator of the Otzar HaTorah school where they were gunned down.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "Barbarity, savagery and cruelty cannot win, hate cannot win. The republic is much stronger than all this.
"One can imagine that the bloodthirsty madness was linked to racism,"
British Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Sarkozy, "People across Britain share the shock and grief that is being felt in France, and my thoughts are with the victims, their friends and their families…. You can count on my every support in confronting these senseless acts of brutality and cowardice."
France’s Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim said, "I am horrified by what happened outside a Jewish school in Toulouse today. It has bruised my body and my soul.”
The bodies of the victims are to be flown to Israel for burial on Wednesday.