More than two-thirds of French citizens are opposed to the suggestion that the kippah should be removed in public places, a survey found.
Seventy percent of respondents in an opinion poll commissioned by the 'Paris Match' magazine said it would be giving in to terrorists if Jews were forced to remove their yarmulkes for security reasons.
The survey was conducted last week after a heated debate erupted in France following one Jewish community leader’s call for Jews in Marseille not to wear their religious headgear.
Earlier last week, a kippah-clad Jewish teacher in Marselle was stabbed by a 15-year-old ISIS symapthizer.
In the representative survey of 1,011 adults, 36 percent of respondents said they “absolutely agreed” with the assertion by French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia, who had called on French Jews to keep wearing yarmulkes “to not give in to the terrorists.”
Another 34 percent indicated they “pretty much agree.”
Ten percent of respondents, who were preselected overall to represent French society’s voting pattern distribution, said they “totally disagree” and another 19 percent said they “rather disagree.”
Left-wing and right-wing respondents answered similarly in the poll, with 71 percent supporting the assertion on the right, including 66 percent within the group that supports the far-right National Front party and 76 percent of the supporters that support leftist parties.
Tzvi Ammar, head of the Marseille chapter of the Consistoire, the communal organization responsible for providing religious services, had called on his city’s Jews to hide traditional head coverings.
"Unfortunately for us, we are targeted," Ammar told the French news agency AFP, adding: "As soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death. "We have to hide ourselves a little bit," he said, adding that making such an appeal made him "sick to the stomach".
However, Roger Cukierman, vic-epresident of the World Jewish Congress and head of France's Jewish umbrella body CRIF, rejected the call, and said Ammar's attitude was "defeatist."
