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(JTA) — Some 100 imams will commemorate the Holocaust at a memorial monument near Paris. Monday’s event is planned for Drancy, a suburb of the French capital where tens of thousands of Jews were confined in 1942 before being transported to extermination camps during the German Nazi occupation, according to a report in the French daily Le Figaro. The paper called the event unprecedented.<\/p>\n
Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy and a veteran activist for dialogue between Muslims and Jews in France and against anti-Semitism, will host the imams.<\/p>\n
Manuel Valls, France\u2019s interior minister, also is scheduled to attend the event, which Le Figaro reported is the initiative of Chalghoumi and the French Jewish novelist Marek Halter.<\/p>\n
In explaining the goal of the event, Halter recalled a landmark visit by 19 French Muslim leaders, many of them imams, to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis had a huge impact in Israel and the Arab World,\u201d Halter told Le Figaro. \u201cThe objective is to re-create this at Drancy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since the second intifada of 2000, France\u2019s Jewish population of approximately 550,000 has experienced an increase in anti-Semitic violence, mostly by Muslim extremists. Last March, Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old French-Algerian Islamist terrorist, killed four Jews at a Jewish day school in Toulouse.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are in a period of crisis, and tensions take the form of violence,\u201d Halter said. \u201cWe need to soothe the tensions. It\u2019s a time bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n