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.

And in the long minutes that passed, Sarah Halimi paid with her life. Muttering Koranic verses and shouting, “I’ve killed the shaitan,” Traoré threw his victim’s body to the street below.

In a France where anti-Semitism has become a fact of life, the name “Sarah Halimi” was about to become iconic — but the media, preoccupied with a close-fought presidential election, didn’t notice.

Thousands of miles away in a tranquil Haifa neighborhood, Yonatan Halimi — a longtime kollel avreich and Sarah’s only son — heard the tragic news, and his life changed forever.

“A relative phoned and said, ‘Something’s happened to your mother,’ ” he recalls of the conversation of four years ago. “And then he slowly broke the news: ‘She didn’t survive.’ ”

As Yonatan Halimi frantically made plans to bring his mother to Israel for burial, he didn’t dream that, having fallen prey to Islamic terror, she would be a victim of the French judiciary as well. In a shock decision three weeks ago, France’s highest court ruled that despite Kobili Traoré’s acknowledged anti-Semitism, he couldn’t be held accountable for the murder because of temporary psychosis aggravated by his drug consumption.

Yonatan Halimi’s sadness is mixed with a weary disbelief born of the long legal struggle, as he searches for words to describe the absurdity of the decision. “The judge said there was no premeditation because of Traoré’s cannabis — yet the killer was lucid enough to be provoked by the sight of my mother’s menorah. Do you think the judge would have ruled that way if the victim were a Muslim?”

As Yonatan Halimi sits in his modest apartment in Haifa’s quiet Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood, there’s something dissonant about the stream of news media beating a path to his door. Serving as rabbi to a growing community of French olim, and disconnected from the storm generated by the ruling, Halimi was shocked to discover that his family’s private tragedy has become something bigger.

A beloved preschool teacher to many in Paris’s chareidi community in life, in death Sarah Halimi has become emblematic of French Jewry’s existential fears. At a demonstration in central Paris two weeks ago, 20,000 people gathered to protest. “I will not become the next Sarah Halimi” read one sign, which spoke volumes about the larger meaning of her case.

“L’Affaire Sarah Halimi,” as it’s known in France, has been compared to the notorious 19th-century Dreyfus trial. The reality is more complicated, because it is not institutionalized anti-Semitism at work this time. Instead, according to Gilles-William Goldnadel, a lawyer hired by Sarah Halimi’s sister to represent the family, the judiciary’s “excessive indulgence for Muslim and minority defendants” pre-ordained the outcome.

But as Sarah Halimi becomes the face of French Jewish unease, her son wonders at the silence of his own community at a frum woman’s fate.

“Why is it,” he asks, when I ring after his return from the Paris demonstration, “that you’re the first chareidi journalist who’s ever called?”