(JTA) For most of his adult life, Sammy Ghozlan has worked with French authorities fighting crime.
Ghozlan, 75, started as a police officer, ascending through the ranks to become a police commissioner in the Paris area.
And since 2002 he has headed one of French Jewry’s most prominent watchdog groups. The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, specializes in documenting hate crimes against Jews and helping victims bring offenders to justice.
Ghozlan, who moved to Israel in 2015, “generally had confidence in the French justice system, despite its flaws” for most of those years, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday.
But that began to change, he said, with the 2017 murder in Paris of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish physician.
