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Students, community members and a foreign ambassador met at the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center of Jewish Life at UCLA on Tuesday to commemorate the life of a Jewish man whose kidnap, torture and murder in France last month has raised concerns within the Jewish community about anti-Semitism.

Ilam Halimi, 23, was a mobile-telephone store clerk in Paris who was found alive on Feb. 13 south of Paris, handcuffed, naked and burned after being tortured for three weeks by a gang demanding a large ransom. He died of his injuries on the way to a hospital.

According to French Consul General Phillippe Larrieu, French authorities say anti-Semitism was behind the attack.

Larrieu described anti-Semitism as racism, bigotry and the “negation of Republican values.”

Hillel Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller called the murder “an incident of gross anti-Semitism,” one in “a spade of incidents that have made the Jewish community feel very vulnerable.”

The memorial service for Halimi was sponsored by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, UCLA Hillel and the French Consulate of Los Angeles.

“We felt that it was appropriate to note the man was tortured and murdered very brutally only because he was Jewish,” Seidler-Feller said.

At the memorial, students sang songs in Hebrew and people bowed their heads and crossed their hands in prayer. French Deputy Consul General Olivier Plancon lit a memorial candle and the ceremony left the audience in silence and quiet reflection.

History Professor David Myers said he hoped the memorial would “remind the community that anti-Semitism, called the longest hatred, is still alive.” During the memorial, Myers praised the French Consulate for being “very quick to attend to the concerns of the Jews” at the local level. He said he hoped the event would educate the UCLA community about the prevalence of anti-Semitism.

The story struck a powerful chord for four reasons, Myers said: “Halimi’s youth, his innocence, the brutality of it and the way a toxic ideology motivated the murder.” The crime revives not only the issue of anti-Semitism but the broader issue of a “narrow understanding of religion, (which is) extremely dangerous,” Seidler-Feller said.

Students said they were particularly disturbed by the violent nature of the hate crime.

“The idea that somebody my age had to undergo three weeks of torture alone ... is incomprehensible,” said Diana Tehrani, a third-year biology student.

Holocaust survivor Doris Montrose said she felt the memorial was important because she didn’t “want it to be ignored like the majority of murders before the Holocaust.”

The service was “really intended for students – Jew, Christian, Muslim, secular,” Myers said, but few outside the Jewish community were in attendance.

With reports from Bruin wire services.

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