#TousAvecUneKippa: Campaign calls for French to wear kippot in solidarity with

Once in custody, the assailant told police that he had attacked the teacher in support of the Islamic State, and was “ashamed” that he was not able to kill his victim.

Francois Hollande has called the idea French Jews would hide their religion out of fear “intolerable”, after an anti-Semitic attack in Marseille.

He said that Jews are attacked and threatened because they are identifiable as Jews, and while the community would do everything possible to ensure the safety of its members, “you can’t assign a policeman or a soldier to every Jew”.

However, France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia urged Jews in France to continue wearing kippot and form a “united front”.

A leading Jewish authority in the southern French city asked fellow Jews on Tuesday to refrain from wearing their traditional skull cap to stay safe after the incident.

A 15-year-old Turkish Kurd attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete in Marseilles on Monday, cutting his shoulder and hand.

Their gesture followed a call by Marseille’s top Jewish leader, Zvi Ammar, for Jewish men and boys to stop wearing the skullcap “until better days”.

Tzvi Ammar, president of the local office of the Consistoire, the organization responsible for religious services, said that Jewish men should “remove the kippah during these troubled times” because “the preservation of life is sacrosanct”. “[Ammar]’s efforts to protect his own come from good intentions, but it’s not the message to send and certainly not the moment”, Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a Socialist, told France Inter radio.

Brice Hortefeux of the opposition, centre-right Republicans party agreed with the chief rabbi that “giving up (the kippa) is giving in”.

Joel Mergui, president of France’s Israelite Central Consistory, said: “If we have to give up wearing any distinctive sign of our identity, it clearly would raise the question of our future in France”.

Anti-Semitic acts in France have soared in recent years, increasing by 84 percent in the period between January 2015 and May 2015 compared with a year earlier, according to official statistics.

France has been under a state of emergency since November 13, when coordinated terror attacks by Islamist militants left 130 people dead and 352 others injured in Paris.

Some 70,000 Jews live inMarseille, making it the second largest Jewish community of France after Paris and his region.