Every Sunday for the past 10 years, at 8 am sharp, Alain Benhamou gets into his car and drives to the synagogue in Bondy, a northeastern Paris suburb. The neighboring city of Villemomble, where he lives, has prayer spaces that are closer, but for him, it is about something else: loyalty to a synagogue he attended for 41 years and the wish to keep the small community in Bondy from disappearing altogether.

Benhamou, 80 years old, left Bondy at the end of 2015 after an anti-Semitic burglary (“dirty Jew” was scrawled on the walls) that had followed other incidents. “A second flight,” he said, after his family left Algeria in the early 1960s. It was around that same time, in 1962, that Bondy’s synagogue was established. Since 2015, after firebombs were thrown at its façade, the building has been hidden behind high walls.

The community was once one of the largest in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, with up to 600 families living in the city’s apartment towers and houses, along with its restaurants and shops. That past vibrancy is now only a memory. On this Sunday morning in late June, there were only five people present, including Rabbi Avraham Lahmi, for the daily prayer.

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