Rabbi Michel Serfaty drives to his first appointment of the day, in a suburb south of Paris, just a couple miles from the notorious housing project where gunman Amedy Coulibaly grew up. Coulibaly was the self-proclaimed Islamist radical who killed a police officer and later four people in a Kosher market in Paris terrorist attacks in January.
France has Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities. For the last decade Serfaty and his team have been working in Paris’s bleak banlieues, trying to promote understanding between the two populations. Serfaty is still going to the same places since the attacks, but there’s now a team of undercover police officers who accompany him everywhere.
The rabbi says he’s more determined than ever. ‘These are difficult times for France and especially for French Jews,’ he says. ‘But if anything, we realize our work is even more important.’
The rabbi makes his way into a community center where his French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association has a stand at a local job fair. Serfaty hopes to recruit several more young people to help with community outreach in the largely Muslim, immigrant communities where most people have never even met a Jewish person.
‘In these places they often have specific ideas about Jews,’ says Serfaty. ‘And if they’re negative, we bring arguments and try to open people’s eyes to what are prejudices and negative stereotypes. We try to show children, mothers and teenagers that being Muslim is great, but if they don’t know any Jews, well this is how they are, and they’re also respectable citizens.’
Serfaty takes advantage of funding from a government program that helps youths without work experience find their first job. He takes them on for a period of three years, giving them valuable training in mediation and community relations. His recruits also study Judaism and Islam, and he takes them on a trip to Auschwitz.
With his current assistants, Mohammed Amine and Aboudalaye Magassa, Serfaty works to find young people who harbor no anti-Semitic feelings. Magassa, twenty-four years old, says working with Serfaty has been a great discovery. ‘These people have weak minds and they are easily manipulated by social networks,’ he says of extremists. ‘They also don’t understand a thing about religion and how it should be practiced.’
Amine and Magassa are proud to be French and Muslim. ‘We are waking up people’s consciences,’ says Amine. ‘This is a job that counts and we could have a real impact if there were more of us.’