Emmanuel Macron attended on Wednesday afternoon the funeral of Mireille Knoll, an octogenarian whose murder caused outrage and revived the concerns about anti-Semitism in France, according to the Elysee.
After the national homage to Constable Arnaud Beltrame, the police officer who was killed by a terrorist after swapping himself for hostage in the Town of Trebbes last week, the president went to the cemetery to visit the grave of Mrs Knoll “in a personal capacity,” said the Elysee.
The trip was not announced and took place in the absence of the media.
Mrs Knoll’s body was discovered on Friday with eleven stab wounds and partly charred in her apartment in Paris. She was 85 years old.
Photos posted on Twitter by people in the cemetery show Mr. Macron, wearing a yarmulke, hugging a relative of the deceased woman.
As part of the investigation, two men were indicted and imprisoned on Tuesday for “voluntary homicide with anti-Semitic motives”.
Mireille Knoll was “murdered because she was Jewish”, a victim of the same “barbarous obscurantism” that Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, killed by the jihadist of Aude, said Emmanuel Macron during the homage paid to the gendarme at the Invalides.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (Crif) in France called for a “white march” in Paris starting at the Place de la Nation and culminating in a rally outside victim’s home.
Members of the government and other political parties have said they will attend the march, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed and Marine Le Pen of the National Front, despite the president of the Crif, Francis Kalifat, saying that he would not like to see representatives from these two parties participate in the march.
