“On the Qur’an of Mecca, I will come with an explosive belt to your synagogue and blow everything up.”

It is a chilling telephone message that those in charge of the Berith Chalom synagogue, located rue Saint-Lazare, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, discovered on their answering machine on Saturday, without requiring the slightest evacuation of the site.

This Tuesday, the manager of the place of worship headed to the 9th arrondissement police station to officially file a complaint. The latter had already contacted the police on Saturday by telephone. The investigators did not delay. The criminal office of the Paris public prosecutor’s office caught him in the act. At the rue Chauchat police station (IXth), the police then immediately contacted the SFR operator in order to identify the holder of the line authorizing the threats. Officials geolocated him in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), where he lives.

“These threats take place in the context of Jewish holidays including Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah,” explains Yonathan Arfi. According to the president of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France) and a Parisian elected official, other threats targeting other synagogues – telephone calls, emails, anti-Semitic insults – have been made in recent weeks. Yonathan Arfi contextualizes these calls “symptomatic of the anti-Semitism of recent times,” which could, according to him, have been fueled by the threats of attack emanating from Al-Qaeda, made two weeks ago, and explicitly targeting the France and Sweden.

The threatening voice message left Friday on the answering machine of the synagogue on rue Saint-Lazare made a confusing reference to Samuel Paty, the professor at a college in Val-d’Oise beheaded by a radicalized Islamist for having shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to his students. The author of the threats also mentioned Palestine.

“All means are being implemented to protect places of worship,” assures Delphine Bürkli, the mayor (Horizon) of the 9th arrondissement, who is in contact with the president of the synagogue. We must not let anything pass.”

The Paris public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation for “threats of materialized death aggravated by the fact that they were committed due to religion” and “threats of dangerous destruction for people.” The first investigations were entrusted to the IXth police station.