2 arrested for Paris murder of Shoah survivor

A Paris rally was set for Wednesday in memory of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Jewish Shoah surivor who was brutally murdered in her apartment. Two men, one of them a neighbor, were arrested.

As a child in 1942, Knoll had managed to evade the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup of Jews by French police for their deportation to Nazi death camps.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Monday in Israel, where he was on an official visit, that France needs to “continue fighting against anti-Semitism.”

He said he learned of the murder as he concluded a visit to Yad Vashem.

Knoll, who lived alone, was found after her apartment was set ablaze, police said. An autopsy showed her charred body had at least 11 stab wounds.

A granddaughter of Knoll, Noa Goldfarb, wrote on Facebook that the arrested neighbor was a 35-year-old Muslim whom the murdered woman had known since he was a child.

“Twenty years ago, I left Paris knowing that neither my future nor that of the Jewish People is to be found there,” wrote Goldfarb, who lives in Herzliya, Israel. “But who would’ve thought that I was leaving my relatives where terrorism and cruelty would lead to such a tragedy. Grandmother was stabbed to death 11 times by a Muslim neighbor she knew well, who made sure to set fire to her home and left us not even one object, a letter, a photograph, to remember her by. All we have are our tears and each other.”

The Paris prosecutor said, “We do not dismiss any hypothesis. A preliminary examination of the elements of the crime does not reveal an anti-Semitic characteristic, but this possibility has not been discounted as police investigate further.”

“The barbarity of this murder sends us back to that of Sarah Halimi just one year ago,” said Francis Kalifat, president of Crif. He urged “the fullest transparency” by the authorities investigating the killing, “so that the motive of this barbarous crime is known as quickly as possible.”

Joel Mergui, president of the Jewish Consistory, said he doesn’t want “to allow to reproduce the silence that followed the assassination of Sarah Halimi a year ago in the same district.”

Halimi, a 66-year-old Jewish teacher and physician, was slaim by a Muslim neighbor.