Sarah Halimi was murdered for being a religious Jew. Why has her own community ignored her fate?
Photos: Menachem Kalish; Flash90
A few days before Pesach 2017, Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish preschool director, had come home from work when an intruder entered through the balcony doors of her third-floor apartment in Paris’s 11th arrondissement.
It was her downstairs neighbor Kobili Traoré, a towering, fanatically religious Muslim originally from Mali, and he’d come to kill her.
Within seconds, Sarah was fighting desperately for her life, as Traoré, high on cannabis, screamed “Allahu Akbar” and beat the frail religious woman savagely. Alerted by the terrified neighbors, police arrived but stood outside the locked apartment door, waiting for an anti-terror unit to arrive.
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A woman holds up a sign during the day of rallies around the world protesting the French judicial system's handling of the Sarah Halimi case, April 25, 2021. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images/ via JTA)
JTA — The 2017 murder of a Jewish woman in France has again burst into global view, with protests held in several countries last week against a legal ruling that means her killer will not face a trial for murder.
But who is Sarah Halimi? Why is her death becoming a cause celebre for Jews around the world? And what, if anything, are the protests aimed at changing for Jews in France?
What’s going on with French Jews right now? What to know about the Sarah Halimi case and why it matters. April 29, 2021 3:11 pm A woman holds up a sign during the day of rallies around the world protesting the French judicial system's handling of the Sarah Halimi case, April 25, 2021. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)
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(JTA) — The 2017 murder of a Jewish woman in France has again burst into global view, with protests held in several countries last week against a legal ruling that means her killer will not face a trial for murder.
But who is Sarah Halimi? Why is her death becoming a cause celebre for Jews around the world? And what, if anything, are the protests aimed at changing for Jews in France?