The Jewish Agency, eager to attract as many Jewish immigrants to Israel as possible, recently began organizing a monthly, all-expense-paid “Aliyah Tapis Rouge,” or “Aliyah on a Red Carpet”—group immigrations from France to Israel. As a non-practicing American Jew living temporarily in France from a family with no particular Zionist passion, I had never really considered going to Israel, and I wondered what the big deal was. Why would anyone want to leave a peaceful welfare state for a country in constant conflict? I never truly came to understand why these French Jews were abandoning everything they had ever known for a place they’d only loved on vacation, but a part of the agency pitch worked its way into that portion of my heart that yearns always to belong (and hates winter). But mostly it was February and it was cold, and I just wanted to get the hell out of Paris, where I had been staying in the apartment of an old friend who lives in Vincennes, a short walk from the last stop on the métro’s No. 1 line, traversing east-west across the city. Just a little farther out, the city is ringed by the sprawling Parisian banlieues—the depressingly indistinct postwar apartment structures, built in the 1950s and 1960s at the collapse of the French colonial empire, that served to accommodate the vast influx of working-class immigrants from the former colonies.

Last year the Jewish Agency counted 1,909 French olim, or people making aliyah, making up slightly more than 10 percent of the total number of immigrants for the year. The agency expects a similar number in 2010. French Jews have a history of making aliyah in times of conflict, whether out of solidarity with Israel or fear of the repercussions in France. Following the Six-Day War of 1967, the number of French olim spiked to 5,000, gradually leveling off to a relatively steady 1,000 a year before climbing back to 2,000 during the real-estate boom of the mid-1990s. Tensions between Jews and Muslims in France mounted to what many considered intolerable levels after the start of the Second Intifada in 2000. Having lived for centuries in the same French-colonized countries of North Africa, these Jews and Arabs became enemies in the poor suburbs of Paris, their identities muddled by a mix of lingering colonial resentments and solidarities with an Arab-Jewish conflict several countries away. The number of French Jews who emigrated to Israel peaked at 3,000 in 2005.

At the airport in Paris, I saw that the Jewish Agency had literalized the VIP: As I waited among a disorganized cluster of homebound Israelis, we looked on in envy at the 60 French olim who walked by on an actual red carpet. On the plane I awoke at 5:00 a.m. to the sound of a woman speaking above me as she waited to use the bathroom. Noticing the thick winter scarf draped across my eyes, she leaned over to the woman behind me, her voice tinged with alarm, and said (in French): “That’s not a burqa, is it?”

***

For many French Jews, the banlieues have come to signify hostility and danger. Although they don’t always say it, the Jews associate the suburbs with Muslims, and they associate Muslims with anti-Semitism. While France does not gather ethnicity statistics, official estimates indicate that the country is home to Europe’s largest population of both Jews and Muslims, at approximately 600,000 and 6 million, respectively. In places like Sarcelles and Créteil, where large populations of Jews and Muslims both live, Jews have been shaken by recent incidents like the highly publicized kidnapping and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi in 2006. Halimi, who was Jewish and worked as a cell-phone salesman in Paris, was lured to Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris, by a group of young African immigrants calling themselves the Barbarians. Initially demanding a ransom of 450,000 euros (about $540,000), the Barbarians held Halimi for three weeks, brutally torturing him. He was found naked and handcuffed in the woods near Bagneux, beaten and burned, and he died on his way to the hospital.

“We know very well it was just because he was Jewish,” Précylia Azau tells me over coffee one Sunday morning at the McCafé cart on the third floor of the Créteil Soleil Regional Commercial Center. Précylia has just moved back to France from Israel. She is thin and petite, her dark features and brown eyes reflecting her Sephardic heritage. She has a large smile that shows a wide gap between her two front teeth, and when she speaks French it is with an accent I assume to be Israeli. “When I find myself all alone in the street I get scared,” she says. “I feel safer in Israel than in France in spite of the bombs.”

Précylia epitomizes the unique ties linking French Jews to Israel. Twelve years ago, Précylia’s parents—both born and raised in France to Algerian parents—decided to move to Israel. Now 24, she has come back to live in her grandmother’s Créteil apartment as she recovers from a breakup with her boyfriend of seven years. Although she misses everything about Israel and says her visit is only temporary, she has begun working at a Jewish preschool and mentions the possibility of enrolling in college here. Through her smile I see a deep melancholy resting in the droop of her dark eyes.

Précylia respects the strict dress code of the Chabad Lubavitch movement she joined in Israel but still manages to look fashionable in a thin wool v-neck sweater and knee-length denim skirt. If I saw her on the street, I wouldn’t have any idea she was Jewish. Even so, she is certain people recognize her as an Israeli, and she says she’s more afraid taking the subway in Paris than she was volunteering as a nurse in Gaza during the war in 2009.

Although her precautions strike me as extreme, at first Précylia’s comments about French society reveal the permeating sense of tension I have always felt but can never quite put my finger on. “People here are cold,” she says. “They’re not lively. They’re dreary.” I ask her if she thinks people in France are anti-Semitic. “Arabs are, that’s for sure,” she says, and I stop nodding along. “I hate Arabs, because I’ve lost people I know because of them.” As she says this, I notice for the first time that she is still very young, even though we are nearly the same age.

When we leave the mall around noon, Précylia and I walk to her grandmother’s tiny kosher bakery a half-mile away. Précylia walks behind the counter and hands me a paper bag with two chocolate croissants. Heading back toward the metro I pass through the mall parking garage, which is garish and ugly, with beams and archways painted in bright pastel purples and oranges. Looking at Créteil spread out before me, I can’t discern any particular order to the streets below. The buildings look plopped down at random. Some have podlike protruding balconies fashioned in that jaunty 1960s mod way that surely must have seemed then to be a harbinger of some utopic future. If I lived here I would spend my entire life dreaming of somewhere else.

NEXT: Are French Jews a population in need of saving? [or view as a single page.]

One of my mother’s most vivid early memories is of the Nazis trying to break down her door. She was five, and the door was the big, heavy front one on the house she was born in, a few yards from the Arno in Florence. It was 1944. As she tells it, the Nazis, who were occupying Florence and had ordered the evacuation of her neighborhood, pounded on the door for some time, while she, her mother, and her older sister cowered inside the house. (Her mother was part of the Resistance; her father, a surgeon in the Italian army, had died in Africa two years before.) But the door held, and the Nazis eventually went away.

Things were different for my father. Unlike my mother, he was Jewish, and in 1943, when he was nine, he, his parents, and his older sister left their home in Milan for a mountain village farther west. The village was called Valmosca, meaning Valley of Flies. It was no longer safe to be Jewish in Italy, so with the help of a colleague of my grandfather’s they lived under a fake surname in Valmosca until the end of the war. My father says that, despite frequently going hungry, he basically enjoyed his two years in hiding, because it was the one period in his life when he got to spend a lot of time with his father. (They went blueberry picking together.) One day the Nazis came to their door. His mother let them in, and when they entered the kitchen, his father yelled at them to keep their dirty boots on the rug—couldn’t they see the floor had just been cleaned? The Nazis checked the family’s forged papers, found them to be in order, and moved on.

My parents met in the medical library at the University of Florence when they were students there in the late 1950s. Before they married, my mother converted to Judaism to appease my father’s family. (Her own mother had moved to Los Angeles by then.) In the mid-’60s they moved to New York City, where I was born and raised. We weren’t observant. Growing up, I was as ignorant of the clichés of New York Jewish life as I was of Judaism’s substance, and though my older brother and I were sent for a year to Sunday school at an Upper West Side synagogue, my only memory of it is a day I now know to be November 20, 1977 (I was seven), when a TV was rolled into the basement room where my class was held, and we watched hours-old news footage of Anwar Sadat shaking hands with Menachem Begin on the tarmac in Israel. My father, who was dropping me off, wept.

My brother and I have always been close—we were born just 15 months apart—yet his interest in, or at least awareness of, Judaism has always been keener than mine. When he was in sixth grade and I was in fourth, I read an essay he wrote for school about our father’s father, titled “The Life of an Italian Jew.” The pride that came through in that title and in the essay surprised me; I’d never thought of putting the words Italian and Jew together. When he was 12, my brother told our parents he wanted to be bar mitzvahed at the Wailing Wall, because the bar mitzvahs of his classmates had more to do with materialism than with belief. I respected his reasoning, but as a burgeoning atheist I was baffled: why would he want a bar mitzvah? In Israel, a couple of days after the ceremony, my father and brother went to visit Masada. I’d come down with something, so my mother and I stayed behind in our hotel room with an issue of Newsweek. (I remember reading a profile of Richard Pryor, having to ask what the phrase “pleasures of the flesh” meant.)

When I was 12, I told my parents I didn’t want a bar mitzvah. They suggested that I should, because someday I might regret not having one. I assured them I wouldn’t. (I don’t.) I was in my fourth year at an Upper East Side boys’ school, where we recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning and sang Christmas hymns every winter. I had spent six summers at an athletic camp in Maine where all the campers went to church every Sunday; the Catholics were driven to a Catholic church, while the rest of us walked to a Baptist one nearby. The only time I recall my Judaism coming up at camp was when an older camper named David Cleary grinned down at me and said, “Kike.” Like the kid in Salinger’s “Down at the Dinghy,” I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was supposed to hurt.

Apparently it wasn’t exposure to conflicting religions that led me to atheism, as that exposure didn’t affect my brother’s beliefs. He didn’t attend the boys’ school I went to, but he was with me all six summers at camp, and he accompanied me to that Baptist church even after his bar mitzvah. (I remember little about my mornings in church, aside from the crushing boredom, but it occurs to me now that I’ve probably spent more hours of my life in churches than in synagogues.) Since then, our respective convictions haven’t wavered: my brother married an observant Jew and sends his daughters to a religious school; I married a Catholic and hope my two-year-old son will make his own religious choices. My parents seem more puzzled by my brother’s path than by mine. But the subject tends to come up only when we’re making plans on a Friday or Saturday.

Recently Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York was quoted in the New York Times as saying, apropos of Bernard Madoff, that “what it means to be a religious person is to be terrified of the possibility that you’re going to harm someone else.” That sentiment, with its echoes of Buddha, the Torah, and Christ, is something I can get behind. (Of course, one could substitute “secular humanist” for “religious person” and make the same assertion.) My admiration for so much Jewish thought is wrapped up in my mind with my father’s years in hiding and my mother’s feeling pressured to convert. I’m also reminded of a scene in a horror movie that I watched at far too early an age (11, to be precise). In An American Werewolf in London, the Jewish protagonist has a nightmare in which his home is invaded by Nazi werewolves. Before his eyes they slaughter every member of his family. The night I saw the movie with my parents and my brother, I couldn’t sleep. Back then, I didn’t know why.

But I’d never been screamed at like this before. And this time, I was the one trying to pray.

It was early morning—the sun muted, but already hot—at the Wailing Wall, or Kotel as it’s known in Hebrew. I had jumped at the chance to join some of David’s female colleagues at a prayer service there. Though I’d been to Jerusalem before, it still felt more like David’s city than mine: He had more friends there, more history, a deeper connection. But this was an only-in-Jerusalem chance to do something I would not have done if it were not for him; it was something I could do only by and for myself. It was a perfect marriage of, well, us: meditative and combative, prayer and protest.

This particular service was the monthly gathering put together by Women of the Wall (WOW), an interdenominational group that has fought since 1988 in courts and in situ to allow women to pray as a group at the Kotel, wearing tallitot, and handling, being called to, and reading from Torah. All those things constitute a colossal violation of the way some Orthodox interpret halacha, Jewish law. Officially, only individual (liturgical or personal) prayer by women is permitted at the Wall, and then, of course, only on the women’s significantly smaller side. (Egalitarian groups are now—with some limitations—permitted to conduct services at the outlying Robinson’s Arch.)

We’d first gotten our bearings in a brief preparatory service in the nearby ruins of the Hurva Synagogue. And then we wrapped ourselves in prayer shawls, hoisted the Torah, and started walking, shoulder to shoulder, toward the women’s side of the wall. I felt a fizzy surge of defiance, of “Look at me, Mom!” pride. Years earlier, my mother, whose feminism I’d had the good sense not to rebel against, had shown me the feminist documentary Half the Kingdom, which featured women reading Torah at this sacred site in 1988. Attempting to, anyway; men hurled invective—and chairs—from the other side. This visible, visceral, tangible display of misogyny had made me cry tears both angry and inspired.

So that morning I was prepared, at least, for the reaction of the men on the plaza in front of the wall, their heads turning toward us, one by one, faster and faster, their eyebrows flying high, their mouths forming perfect Os of anger.

But being warned and being prepared are two different things. And what I was not ready for at all was the reaction of the women among whom we had come to pray. (Was this part not in the movie? I just don’t remember.) As we tried to make our way down the narrow passage toward the women’s side of the wall, they—and their children—closed a swirling circle around us, blocking our way, drowning our voices with their own, screaming into our ears and eyes, shaking fists at the sky.

I tried to stare at my siddur, blur my peripheral vision, and concentrate on the words of the opening psalms. But there was no way. All I could do was mouth them, and still I lost my place. The women surrounding us hissed, they spat; I shook. In a rumble with Operation Rescue—who, recall, are protesting what they consider murder—these women would win. At some point before we completed the service, our group members nodded to each other in silent agreement that yes, it was time to retreat.

In the presence of those women, I have to admit, I felt less defiant. Deflated. Maybe even a little chastened. With the men, it was easy to feel “us” vs. “them.” With the women, it was “us” vs. “us.” I felt as if I’d committed an act of intimate trespass.

Yet I was not trespassing. Not on that day, or any other day when I, a liberal Jew, go to experience the wall. On one level, I realize that it is just that: a wall. A structure of immense archeological, historical, and symbolic significance, but not of magical wish-granting powers. Even so, when I am there, I get all goopy and moved and superstitious. Even though I don’t believe in wish-list prayer, I believe that any entreaties—including, pretty please, Barack Obama—we write and tuck into a nook will at least land in the inbox of a higher power. I tear up when I think of the famous photo of Israeli soldiers reaching the wall for the first time in 1967; I tear up when I think of my mother, in tears herself on her first post-1967 visit to Jerusalem, touching the wall with one hand and holding mine in the other.

But when I’m at the wall, I am also made to feel—at best—like a visitor, like someone poking her head into a beautiful old church while Mass is taking place. We own this place, say those who make the rules there; you tourists, we tolerate. Mostly. This past summer, when I went to take Bess—l’dor va’dor—to touch those stones, and to pray for the health of her then-microscopic sibling, I was reprimanded by a roaming modesty cop for removing my shoulder-covering sweater, even though I was way up near the exit. I do not mind covering up, in principle, in any place of worship; I would anyway. I do mind being told to do so. Our wall, our rules. Us here, you there, praying only one way.

Of course, just about any liberal American Jew’s feelings about just about anything in Israel are mixed. So, yes: I resent that my—and, I imagine, many other liberal Jews’—experience of the wall needs to be mediated through someone else’s. For me, a glimpse of the mechitza inspires rage even as a glimpse of the stones inspires awe; when I see the wall, I have equally strong urges to drop to my knees and to bare my breasts. Why should this wall belong to one particular group of Jews any more than it belongs to those soldiers, to David’s congregants, to my daughter?

But as I left the wall this most recent time, grousing about the sweater incident—it was 95 degrees, for God’s sake!—I started thinking about how I’d explain it to Bess if she were old enough to understand. Tempting as it is to be ornery, I knew that a gentler, accepting-of-difference approach would probably be a more wholesome way to go. Which brought me, in a conversation with David over fresh-squeezed juice, to the concept of clal yisrael—the community of Israel as a whole. In that spirit, here is the homework I’m giving myself: to consider that everyone who finds meaning in the wall, no matter the “rules,” are my brothers and (yes) sisters. It’s not as hokey as it sounds. After all, that’s precisely why my encounters at the wall rankled far deeper and longer than any clinic protest. You know, it’s always worse when it’s family.

And that’s exactly where, by the very same token, I must work to find a place of peace. Contrary though it sounds, it is possible, and maybe necessary, to both protest unjust divisions and avoid perpetuating them. My prayers may not be halachically correct to all, but they are as authentic as any. And that, for me, is enough. Because the wall belongs to all of us. And that is why, with or without tallit and Torah, I will keep going back.