Benjamin Peter edited by Wassila Belhacine 1:29 p.m., March 20, 2022

Ten years after the terrorist attacks in Toulouse and Montauban which killed seven people, including Jewish children, the trauma is still significant for the Jewish community.

President Emmanuel Macron and his Israeli counterpart, Isaac Herzog, will pay tribute to the victims this Sunday, March 20.

Toulouse pays tribute to the victims of the attacks perpetrated by Mohamed Merah in March 2012. These attacks caused the death of three paratroopers and three children and a teacher from the Jewish school Ozar Hatorah.

A large commemoration ceremony with 2000 guests, in which Emmanuel Macron, François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy will participate, but also representatives of the Muslim faith and hundreds of personalities from civil society, will take place this Sunday, March 20.

The memory of the attacks has left a still vivid trauma, especially within the Jewish community.

“There is a joie de vivre and a carelessness that has been lost”

"We hadn't been there an hour and we were already saying to ourselves that nothing will be the same again," says Pierre Lasry at the microphone of Europe 1. The man arrived just minutes after the killing.

Her 14-year-old daughter was in the Jewish school Ozar Hatorah, terrified by the assassinations she had just witnessed and which left traces in her memory.

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"I don't have the impression that my daughter jumps at the slightest noise, but there is something a little broken. There is a joie de vivre and a carefreeness that has been lost. We wake up in the morning and we Think back on it. We have fallen so deeply into an abyss of cruelty. It's such an abomination. You don't kill children without life changing at all," he continues.

Solitude of the Jewish community 

Nicole Yardeni, former president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) in Toulouse, remembers the loneliness of the Jewish community at the time in the face of terrorism: "From 2012 to 2015, what we had seen was not really understood by the general population. The Jews felt lonely because it took the November attacks for the general population to feel directly concerned."

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After a private ceremony this morning, Emmanuel Macron and Israeli President Isaac Herzog will lay a wreath before taking part in a time of reading and music in tribute to the victims of Toulouse.