Schools set on fire in the Paris suburbs, students hurling objects at police in Rennes and Grenoble, and nearly 5,000 arrests have pushed Israel’s government to plan for something it has seen before: French Jews heading for the airport. The Bible named the force behind this moment four thousand years ago. Ishmael, Yishma-El in Hebrew, means “God will hear,” and the Sages taught that the pressure from Ishmael’s descendants at the end of days would bring the cry of the Jewish people before God and the Jews of the exile back to their land.
At the cabinet meeting on Tuesday, October 6, Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer told ministers that Israel should prepare to absorb a potential mass wave of immigration by French Jews, according to two sources who attended the meeting. “We need to remove the barriers in order to allow them to come here,” Sofer said, adding that the plan should also help less affluent members of France’s Jewish community. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Sofer, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli to prepare a joint plan. Smotrich said funding should go toward economically vulnerable immigrants and toward housing projects for the expected wave.
National Missions Minister Orit Strock warned in the same meeting that the unrest could turn on France’s Jews. “Jews are currently afraid to walk the streets,” Strock said.
A France in flames
The unrest began in late September, when students at hundreds of schools, particularly in poor working-class suburbs such as Saint-Denis outside Paris, began blocking school entrances, obstructing roads, setting garbage bins on fire, and attacking police officers and passersby. The protests spread from Paris to Marseille, Nantes and Montpellier. The students’ stated grievances were teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and crumbling school buildings.
The protests quickly turned violent. According to the French Education Ministry, around 24 schools have been set on fire or looted and 78 education staff members have been injured. The Justice Ministry reported that 735 of France’s roughly 3,700 schools have been affected by the violence, and about 85% of those arrested are minors. Critics have accused the far-left La France Insoumise party, led by staunchly anti-Israel politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of inciting the violence, and have pointed to the involvement of immigrants and the children of immigrants in the street clashes.
The numbers since October 7
The cabinet discussion came as French aliyah (immigration to Israel) is running at a pace not seen in nearly a decade. Nearly 4,000 French Jews have immigrated to Israel so far this year, 40% more than in the same period last year, a figure the Jerusalem Post described as a record. The year is on pace to be the strongest for French aliyah since the great wave of 2014 to 2016, when surging antisemitism and Islamist terror drove 7,231 French Jews to Israel in 2014, a record 7,900 in 2015, and 5,000 in 2016.
The current climb began with the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. In 2023, 1,097 French Jews made aliyah. That figure more than doubled to 2,234 in 2024 and climbed to 3,357 in 2025. In all, more than 7,000 French Jews have moved to Israel since the war began. Of the roughly 80,000 Jews worldwide who have opened aliyah files with the Jewish Agency since October 7, about 20,000 are from France.
The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, which partnered with the Aliyah Ministry and the Jewish Agency on a special “Families Flight” of 140 French immigrants in August, has played a direct role. ICEJ President Jürgen Bühler said the increase in French aliyah was “especially encouraging given the country’s ongoing security challenges.”
The olim (immigrants) are leaving a country where hatred of Jews spiked overnight after October 7. The French Interior Ministry recorded 436 antisemitic acts in 2022. That number nearly quadrupled to 1,676 in 2023, followed by 1,570 in 2024 and 1,320 in 2025. Antisemitic acts made up 53% of all anti-religious incidents in France last year, though Jews make up less than one percent of the population. The ministry concluded that the sustained high level reflects a deeply rooted phenomenon rather than a temporary surge.
Much of that hatred travels under the Palestinian flag. According to the CRIF, the umbrella body of French Jewry, more than 30% of antisemitic incidents in France in 2024 made direct reference to “Palestine.” In August 2024, a man filmed with a Palestinian flag tied around his waist set fire to the doors of the Beth Yaakov synagogue in La Grande-Motte and to cars outside, triggering a gas-canister explosion that wounded a police officer. CRIF President Yonathan Arfi called it an attempt to kill Jews. In February, at a ceremony marking 20 years since the torture-murder of Ilan Halimi, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that “the antisemitic hydra has kept advancing.”
The last great wave
The previous wave followed a string of Islamist attacks that began with the 2012 shooting at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse. Aliyah from France rose from 1,900 in 2012 to 3,400 in 2013 and to 7,231 in 2014, making France the largest source of immigrants to Israel for the first time. That year, the number of antisemitic acts recorded in France doubled to 851, and antisemitic riots and violence broke out at anti-Israel rallies during the summer’s Gaza war.
Then came January 2015. Two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Amédy Coulibaly took hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris and murdered four Jews. Two days after that, hundreds of French Jews attended a Jewish Agency aliyah fair in central Paris under tight security. The fair had been scheduled weeks before the attacks. Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky took pains to say Israel would not exploit the bloodshed. “We’re not building our aliyah strategy on tragic events,” he said. In the first five months of 2015, antisemitic acts rose 84% over the same period a year earlier, and death threats made up about three quarters of the incidents. France ended 2015 with 808 antisemitic acts and the largest single year of French aliyah in history.
Today’s numbers are worse. The 1,676 antisemitic acts recorded in 2023 are roughly double the 2015 count that drove the last great wave.
The terror of that era came within a block of an aliyah meeting. On July 14, 2016, Bastille Day, an Islamist terrorist drove a 19-ton truck through crowds celebrating on Nice’s seafront promenade, killing 86 people. French Jews were attending an aliyah meeting organized by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews one block away when the truck struck the crowd. Among the dead were Texan Sean Copeland and his 11-year-old son Brodie, and Raymonde Mamane, a 77-year-old French Jewish woman. Local Jewish leaders later described the attack as a watershed that sent Jews streaming out of Nice. Chabad emissary Rabbi Yossef Yitschok Pinson said it “created a wave of people leaving.”
North America follows
The same pressures are moving American and Canadian Jews. In August, more than 1,100 North Americans made aliyah through Nefesh B’Nefesh, the largest single month in the organization’s history. “It’s record-breaking for us,” said Marc Rosenberg, the group’s vice president of Diaspora partnerships. About 2,700 North Americans had made aliyah by the end of August, and Nefesh B’Nefesh expects roughly 4,000 for the year. In 2025, more than 4,100 North Americans made the move, the highest annual figure in four years. This year the organization also welcomed its 100,000th immigrant.
They are leaving behind an America where the ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest since it began tracking in 1979. In 58% of those incidents, the hatred was tied to Israel or Zionism, the first time that category made up a majority. Incidents fell by a third in 2025, to 6,274, still higher than any year before October 7. Physical assaults kept rising. A Tel Aviv University study found that 20 deaths in Australia, Britain, and the United States made 2025 the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks since 1994.
Yishma-El: God will hear
The Bible encodes the role of the mobs in a name. When the angel found Hagar in the wilderness, pregnant and fleeing Sarah, he told her what to call her son:
“And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son; and thou shalt call his name Ishmael, because the LORD hath heard thy affliction'” (Genesis 16:11).
Yishmael means “God will hear.” The Sages read the name as a prophecy about Israel. The midrash Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer (chapter 32) teaches that Ishmael received this name because God would one day hear the cry of the Jewish people over what the sons of Ishmael would do to them in the Land of Israel at the end of days.
Rabbi Pinchas Winston explained the name’s meaning for our era in a 2019 interview with Breaking Israel News. Ishmael’s role, he taught, is implicit in the name Yishma-El. Like the Egyptians before the Exodus, the sons of Ishmael push the Jewish people until they cry out to God to save them, bring the Messiah, and restore the Temple. For that reason, Winston said, no peace with them will come from reason or politics. “The only thing the Jews can do is what we were supposed to do; cry out to God.”
The Exodus follows the same order. After generations of slavery in Egypt, the Bible records that the Children of Israel “cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Exodus 2:23-24). God heard the cry, and the redemption followed.
The name also works in the other direction. God hears Israel’s cry, and the cry forces Israel to hear God. Each pro-Palestinian mob in the streets of Paris, each burned synagogue door in La Grande-Motte, and each “from the river to the sea” chant on an American campus carries the same message to the Jews of the Diaspora: the exile is ending, and it is time to come home. The Jews of France have heard it twice in a decade. The record month at Ben Gurion Airport this August shows the Jews of North America are hearing it too.
Coming home
Ministers in Jerusalem are now drawing up housing plans, and the Jewish Agency reports thousands of open files. The prophet Isaiah described the scene unfolding at Ben Gurion Airport:
“I will say to the north: ‘Give up,’ and to the south: ‘Keep not back, bring My sons from far, and My daughters from the end of the earth'” (Isaiah 43:6).
