By Laure Valentin with AFP
Published on •Updated
Usually peaceful, the Deux Alpes resort found itself at the centre of controversy a few days ago after a video went viral on social media in which a shopkeeper, leaning on the counter of her refreshment stall, can be heard telling an Orthodox Jewish man: “The Jewish community, there are too many of you. At some point it gets on people’s nerves.”
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An investigation has been opened following the incident. But it has cast a chill over the resort, which every summer, for decades, has welcomed Orthodox Jewish families.
“Let’s say it has created a bad atmosphere in the resort; Orthodox Jewish tourists don’t cooperate at all, they don’t take part in anything, not the restaurants, not the bars, not the activities – well, only the children’s activities, the games, that’s all,” explains Danièle, a regular visitor to the resort.
The case has also got people talking and highlighted tensions that can arise in Alpine resorts between local residents and holidaymakers.
“There are other people who, even when we walk down the street with the children, speak badly to them because they are wearing kippot. That shows that people are frustrated that there are children around, that there are a lot of Jews, so in the end this is not an isolated situation,” says Hannah Lasry, a Jewish tourist.
The director of the Alpe d’Huez tourist office, Sébastien Merignargues, says: “When I was in Tignes, there were issues, for example with the swimming pool, about bathing – men, women – the lifeguards had to be the same sex as the swimmers, small things like that, and it’s true that these are ways of operating that we don’t have, so they can, I don’t know if ‘conflict’ is the right word, but in any case there is a need for adjustment and sometimes they are simply sticking points.”
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez was quick to condemn the antisemitic remarks. After hearings, the investigation was passed “for review” to the Grenoble public prosecutor’s office, the latter said at the start of the week.
For several years now, Deux Alpes has hosted the Beth Loubavitch summer seminar (part of the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic movement Chabad-Lubavitch), a major gathering for French-speaking Judaism that consistently attracts hundreds of people over three weeks. Created in the late 1960s, when hundreds of thousands of Jews from North Africa were arriving in mainland France, the seminar has since moved from resort to resort in the Alps.
