NEW YORK TIMES — For Kevin Nakache, the breaking point came last year. First, one of his friends was gunned down in the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris a few days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Then, in October, Mr. Nakache’s former Hebrew teacher barely escaped a knife attack in Marseille, his hometown in southern France, where violence against Jews is on the rise.
Fed up, Mr. Nakache decided last fall to follow many other French Jews and leave the country. But rather than going to Israel, an increasingly popular destination for those choosing to leave France after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, or the United States, Mr. Nakache chose to emigrate to London. In so doing, he joined a growing stream of French Jews who see the British capital as a convenient and less threatening option as France grapples with the radicalization of young Muslims and a rise in anti-Semitism.
“When people around you get attacked, it’s frightening,” he said. “You start thinking you’re next.”
Watching the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo unfold, “I just knew that the next victims would be Jews,” he said. He was right. Four Jews, including his friend, died in the kosher supermarket in Paris after being taken hostage with 25 other shoppers by a militant claiming allegiance to the Islamic State. More recently, after Mr. Nakache left, a rabbi in Marseille was nearly hacked to death by a supporter of the Islamic State.
“For goodness sake,” he said, “why do they have to kill us just because we’re Jews?”
About 5,000 French Jews are thought to have moved to Britain over the past two years, according to the Conference of European Rabbis. Britain is now a leading destination for French Jews, after Israel, which welcomed 7,800 French Jews last year, said Avi Mayer, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency. The number moving to Israel has more than doubled in just two years, he said, a trend that started in 2012 when Mohammed Merah, who called himself a Qaeda jihadist, shot French soldiers and Jewish schoolchildren in southwestern France.
Even though Britain has its own problems with anti-Semitism, London has emerged as a prime destination for French Jews primarily because there are better job opportunities in Britain than in France and it is easy to move: It is a train ride away from Paris, and visas are not required for citizens of the European Union to live and work in Britain.
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