French Jewish festival opens in Paris

The first Festival of Jewish Cultures of Paris has begun and is to last two weeks. The event is sponsored by the Unified Jewish Social Fund and is under the theme “Honoring Yiddish”. Events include exhibitions, roundtables, concerts, children’s activities, plays, films, and a conference on Isaac Bashevis Singer. “We wanted to make it a community festival. The objective was to make it as pluralist as possible,” Lucien Khalfa, head of the fund’s cultural department, told JTA. The festival is being held in the Marais, a Jewish neighborhood of Paris, to recall the era when Yiddish was spoken in local shops. The first event is the inauguration of the Place Bernard Lazare, named for the first journalist to stand up in defense of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. Next year’s festival will be dedicated to Sephardi culture, Khalfa said, in partnership with Barcelona and Montreal.