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French singer heckled as ‘dirty Jew’

PARIS, Feb 1 (AFP) – French police said Sunday they planned to investigate an incident where a young Jewish singer was targeted at a concert by anti-Semitic insults, including being called a “dirty Jew.”

A regional police official, Gilles Lagarde, said the incident occurred late Saturday in the eastern town of Macon when the 25-year-old entertainer Jennifer Djaoui – known by her stage name Shirel – went on stage to sing a song entitled “Jerusalem”.

According to the head of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, Roger Cukierman, “around 30 young people of North African origin sitting in the front rows started to insult Shirel with cries of ‘dirty Jew, death to Jews, we’ll kill you’.”

 He said the singer intended to lodge a formal complaint Monday.

Lagarde confirmed that teenagers were involved and that the threat “death to Jews” had been made, but added: “It seems the cries were pretty isolated… the officers didn’t hear them, there was a lot of noise.”

But he said a search was on for the suspects, and stressed that “we take these things very seriously.”

One of the organisers of the charity concert, former French judo champion David Douillet, told AFP that the singer “was very shocked” by the insults and that she had been comforted by Bernadette Chirac, the wife of the French president who was in the audience.

Dajoui, whose biggest moment of fame so far has been a leading role in a French musical version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, converted to Judaism after her father, a French producer, went to live in Israel, where she now spends most of her time. Her mother is Jeane Manson, a French pop singer of the 1990s.

© AFP

                                                              Subject: France news