Immigrants to Israel from seven countries will light Hanukkah candles Tuesday night simultaneously with Jews in seven other countries in a ceremony organized by the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption and The Jewish Agency for Israel.

The candle lighting in Israel will take place at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, where 300 young olim  from France, Ethiopia, the United States, Yemen, Latvia, Latin America, and the Bnei Menashe community of India will be joined by Jews lighting at the same time in Paris, London, Moscow, Kiev, Tashkent and Budapest.

The event will be broadcast live  here at 3:30 p.m. Israel time (8:30 a.m. EST).

France police are scouring Paris and surrounding areas for a lone gunman who critically wounded a leftwing newspaper’s assistant to a photojournalist Monday, days after gunman broke into CNN’s affiliate and threatened journalists before fleeing. It is not known if the threat on Friday and Monday’s shooting are connected.

The French daily Liberation in Paris said the man entered its offices on Monday with a shotgun and fired twice, hitting the 27-year-old victim in the chest. The gunman later opened fire in front of bank high-rise without injuring anyone.

The Interior Ministry ordered police deployment at offices of all French newspapers.

By Cnaan Liphshiz

With scooter helmets in hand, Yohan and six buddies stroll around Paris’ 20th Arrondissement looking much like a typical group of French students — until they locate a group of Arab men they suspect of perpetrating an antisemitic attack the previous day.

Using their helmets as bludgeons, members of France’s Jewish Defense League, or LDJ, set upon the Arabs and beat them. Several of the Arabs attempt to escape in a blue sedan, but the LDJ members pursue the vehicle, causing it to crash into a stone wall.

The attack last August, filmed by a television crew shooting a documentary on LDJ, was one of at least 115 violent incidents that critics attribute to the group since its registration in France in 2001 — a year after the eruption of the second intifada in Israel and the sevenfold increase in antisemitic incidents in the 12 years that followed.

“Now they know the price of Jewish blood,” said Yohan—the nom de guerre of Joseph Ayache, one of LDJ’s young leaders.

An offshoot of the American Jewish Defense League, which was founded in New York by the Rabbi Meir Kahane, LDJ engages in sometimes violent reprisals to antisemitic attacks.

The group, which numbers about 300 members, is now on a collision course with France’s Jewish establishment, which has condemned its activities and threatened a lawsuit.

LDJ is ratcheting up its deterrent potential by showcasing its activities following the murder of Jewish school children in Toulouse last year by the a Muslim.

LDJ traditionally shied away from media attention. But in the weeks after the Toulouse killings, which were then followed by a 58 percent increase in attacks on Jews in France, LDJ for the first time allowed a television crew to tag along on a number of guerrilla operations.

In addition to the helmet assault, Ayache was filmed calling for revenge killings in posters he and his group posted around central Paris. When a police car came by, Ayache told officers that he and his friends were working on an art project. The police officers wished him a pleasant evening and drove away.

Ayache also was filmed attempting to storm a performance of the antisemitic comedian Dieudonne.

“Since when is it illegal to run?” Ayache told the police after they detained him.

Another sequence shows Ayache firing a pistol at a shooting range.

“We’ve noticed the Muslim community believes LDJ is some vast machine that operates with impunity and gets help from Mossad,” said an LDJ spokesman who goes by the alias Amnon Cohen. “It’s not true, but it’s not a bad thing if they are scared. It’ll make them think twice.”

LDJ’s growing assertiveness has further strained the group’s already tense relationship with the CRIF, the umbrella body of French Jewish communities.

In April, CRIF’s former president, Richard Prasquier, said he would sue LDJ for defamation for posting a photograph on its website depicting him with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The caption accuses Prasquier of “pardoning [a] killer”:

LDJ, meanwhile, has accused CRIF of being undemocratic, obsolete and ineffective.

“We operate outside and independently, and that creates opposition within the establishment, which is run by men and women who mean well but don’t know the painful reality of the Jewish rank and file in Paris’ suburbs and poor neighborhoods,” Cohen said.

“There are hundreds of French and Belgian Muslims fighting in the Syrian civil war. When they return, do you think they will be scared of a couple guards trained by the community?”

CRIF declined to comment.

Earlier this month, LDJ announced that its “soldiers” had put a young Arab in the hospital in a coma, “a rapid and effective response” to the man’s attack on Jews at Saint-Mande, just east of Paris.

The announcement drew calls to ban LDJ. As criticism mounted, LDJ retracted the statement and denied any involvement in the violence.

Cohen told JTA the person who published the “false statement” had been removed from the group and that the violence actually resulted from a drug deal gone sour. A spokesperson for the Saint-Mande municipality confirmed that account.

Still, the events at Saint-Mande resulted in a public row between LDJ and CRIF, which on June 4 blamed LDJ for the violence at Saint Mande and for subsequent calls “to take revenge against the Jews.”

Sources familiar with the events in Syria have told Israel Army Radio on Wednesday morning that military officers from France have been training Syrian rebels in Jordan and Turkey. The information reveals a picture whereby the government in Paris is the most active among Western nations in attempting to topple Assad

The French military officers are instructing the Syrian rebels on the use of the advanced weapons with which they’ve been supplied, in Jordanian and Turkish territories.

The information indicates that Paris is the life and soul of the Western campaign to topple the Assad regime. The French also work hard at the “Geneva Conference 2″ to resolve the situation in Syria, although chances are low that it will indeed take place.

French intelligence officers are coordinating their activities with their Saudi counterparts, who invested large sums of money in funding the rebels. Over the past two weeks, since the fall of the city of Kosiir into the hands of President Bashar Assad’s army, the French have held several meetings with representatives of Saudi intelligence and Turkish security systems executives, to coordinate their actions, especially in light of the approaching battle over control of Aleppo.

A frequent participant in these coordination meetings is Brigadier General Salim Idriss, commander of the largest rebel army, the Free Syrian Army.

France and Saudi Arabia have marked Brigadier General Idriss as their Man among the rebels, and he is provided with the bulk of arms and ammunition coming in from the west.

Brigadier General Idris is a former Syrian army officer, originally from the city of Homs, who was given the top position only six months ago. He is known for his opposition to the Jihadist organizations that are currently fighting in Syria.

A senior rabbi from Paris has warned Israel’s agriculture minister that legislation in Israel to ban the import of goose liver could jeopardize kosher slaughter in Europe.

“Imagine how it will look if Israel itself is the first to ban the import of goose liver, which was an issue raised by these animal welfare groups [opposing kosher slaughter],” Rabbi Yirmiyahu Cohen, the head of the rabbinical court in Paris, wrote Minister of Agriculture Yair Shamir.

Cohen’s letter was sent on Sunday, the same day that Shamir said he would remove his appeal against a bill prohibiting the trade of “foie gras,” a delicacy made from goose liver which is produced commercially by force-feeding ducks and geese.

The practice was banned in Israel several years ago after the High Court of Justice deemed it abusive, but the import and sale of the product remain legal.

“It is known that some European nations are listening to animal welfare groups’ concerns in order to proscribe shechitah,” Cohen also wrote, adding that the same groups also oppose the production of “foie gras.” Cohen warned, “Proponents of this law give a weapon to our enemies.

He wrote that that he is familiar with the process of force-feeding and the kosher slaughter of geese after visiting on a number of occasions one of the largest facilities in Hungary and witnessing the procedure for himself. He said, unlike previously, where the procedure was done in a manner injurious to the geese, Hungary developed a method that is not harmful to the birds.

An assailant, reportedly a mental patient of Iranian origin, stabbed a rabbi and his son as they entered a Paris synagogue, the French newspaper The Local reported.

The assailant was said to have escaped from a psychiatric hospital near Lyon two weeks ago, but police have not confirmed the report.

The 49-year-old rabbi, who was identified only as “Rabbi Baruch,” was going into the Beth El synagogue around 7:30 a.m. with his 17-year-old son, apparently for morning prayers, when the attacker lunged for the rabbi’s throat with a utility knife or a box cutter. The rabbi suffered light to moderate wounds as did his son, who was stabbed in the neck. Onlookers quickly overpower the Iranian, and police took him into custody.

French television reported that the assailant was wearing hospital clothes.

A music segment from a 2012 flash mob performance, from Paris, using decidedly non-traditional versions of the traditional Passover songs ‘Ma Nishtana’ (םה נשתנה) ”What has changed,” and “Let my people go,” by the band Cigarillos en el Shtruddle.

Visit CifWatch.

Israel’s Jewish population crossed the 6 million mark during Passover, a symbolic sign of peaceful vengeance for the approximately same number of Jews who were exterminated by the Nazi regime.

The Israel Jewish community, which compromises approximately 75 percent of the total population outside of Judea and Samaria, now is the largest in the world, depending on one’s definition of “Who is a Jew?”

The American Jewish population is estimated by most sources as being 5.5 million, while it is up to 2 million larger if one includes as Jewish those who were born to Jewish fathers but not to Jewish fathers and those who were not converted according to Jewish tradition.

The largest American Jewish population center is in New York City, with approximately 2 million. followed by nearly half a million in Paris.

There are approximately 380,000 Jews in Canada, with most of them living in metropolitan Toronto. Next in Line is Britain’s 290,000 Jews.

“In the world today there are 13,800,000 Jews,” Hebrew University Professor Sergio Della Pergola told the Yediot Acharonot newspaper.

“Israel has indeed experienced a growth in the number of Jews last year, but world Jewry outside Israel did not fare so well. On the contrary, world Jewry has experienced negative growth,” reflecting assimilation.

Although most of the world’s Jews live outside Israel, Israeli historian and author Tom Segev told the London Daily Telegraph, “Within five, seven or 10 years, you might be able to say that most Jews in the world live inside Israel, and it will be legitimate to use the cliché that for the first time in 2,000 years, the Jews are in Israel. Then the question will be, what do you do with the Zionist ideology?”

Israelis are attracted to metropolitan Tel Aviv, but massive government programs, including new highways and rail links, are trying to reverse the trend and encourage Jews to settle in the Negev and the Galilee.