Two men went on trial over the 2018 murder of an elderly Jewish woman that provoked protests and alarm in France about anti-Semitic crime. The partly burned body of Mirreille Knoll was found in her apartment in central Paris after she had been stabbed 11 times before her home was set on fire. Knoll was a survivor of a 1942 roundup of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris.
President Emmanuel Macron had said her killer had “murdered an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish and in doing so had sullied our most sacred values and our memory.” One of the suspect’s lawyers denied this claim and said prosecutors had not “had the courage to abandon the anti-Semitic motive because of the pressure of public opinion.”
Some 30,000 people had taken part in a silent march in Knoll’s memory in March 2018. One of the organizers, Sabrina Moise, said at that time that she felt it was “no longer safe for Jews because of galloping anti-Semitism.”
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