Calls growing for French rabbi to resign over plagiarism charges

(JTA) — Calls for the resignation of France’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, are increasing over revelations that he allegedly committed plagiarism and used unearned academic titles.

The French daily Le Figaro on Tuesday reported that “there was heavy pressure” on the part of unnamed officials from the Jewish community for Bernheim to resign.

Bernard Guigui, vice president of the Marseille branch of the Consistoire, which is responsible for religious Jewish services, told JTA that while “we do not demand Bernheim resign, everybody is talking about it. I think when you have such a huge responsibility and commit such an error, it’s better not to embarrass and hurt the Jewish community but step back and resign.”

Meanwhile, Le Monde reported that it obtained a letter on Tuesday calling for Bernheim’s resignation that was signed by an obscure entity called the “Collective Consistoire Community.”

Yael Hirschhorn, a spokeswoman for Bernheim, told JTA that her office would not comment on calls for Bernheim’s resignation.

Bernheim is scheduled to speak on Tuesday evening on Radio Shalom and address new charges of plagiarism and falsifying his academic credentials, according to Jewpop, a French Jewish news site.

Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, France’s umbrella organization of Jewish communities, urged Bernheim, to “explain” allegations that he committed plagiarism and used unearned academic titles.

“I expect and we all expect a clear and complete explanation,” Prasquier wrote Tuesday on the CRIF website.

Bernheim said last week that his 2011 book “40 Jewish Meditations” contained one passage that his ghostwriter plagiarized without Bernheim’s knowledge.

Since then, he has since been accused of at least three additional cases of plagiarism in the same book and in two earlier publications. Also, the French media reported that several of Bernheim’s biographies said he passed a competitive test in philosophy for civil servants known in France as agregation while there was in fact no record of Bernheim ever passing the test.

Bernheim has made no public comment on the later charges.

Jean-Noel Darde, a senior lecturer at Paris 8 University, wrote on his blog Monday that Bernheim plagiarized another text in his essay against gay marriage titled “Homosexual Marriage, Gay Parenting and Adoption: What We Forgot to Say.”

Eight lines of the essay, which then-Pope Benedict quoted during a speech at the Vatican in December, were copied “word for word” without credit from a book titled “The Ideology of Gender: Chosen or Transmitted Identity” published seven months before Bernheim’s 50-page essay, Darde said.

Darde wrote he found another instance of plagiarism in Bernheim’s 2002 book “Caring for Others: At the Foundation of Jewish Law,” which allegedly contains passages lifted from “The Eloquence of Tears,” a book published two years earlier.

Other critics said they found additional plagiarized passages in the 2011 book from Jean-Francois Lyotard, Elie Wiesel and Jean-Marie Domenach.