MARSEILLE (France), April 1: France was forced on Monday to confront the spectre of violence after a spate of attacks climaxed with the burning of a synagogue and forced the issue to the forefront of the political agenda.

Riot police were deployed to protect Jewish buildings in Marseille after the arson attack, the third such blaze in a weekend of incidents.

Three weeks ahead of the first round of voting in its presidential election, France was already mesmerized by a wave of violent crime and the latest attacks cast an ugly cloud over the tense law and order debate.

“These acts are completely unimaginable, unpardonable, indescribable and should be investigated and punished as such,” President Jacques Chirac said on a visit to the northern city of Le Havre.

Visiting a synagogue, Chirac called on the government of his main rival in the coming poll, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, to do more to protect France’s 700,000-strong Jewish community.

Police and prosecutors said the fire in Marseille, which totally destroyed a 20-year-old synagogue, was almost certainly criminal in origin.

“I am crushed, disgusted,” said Zvi Ammar, head of the Jewish Consistory in Marseille. “It is time that those carrying out these anti-Semitic attacks are arrested and that the members of our community are protected correctly.”

Marseille regional governor (prefect) Yvon Ollivier ordered 120 police to secure the remaining 42 synagogues and 17 Jewish schools in the city. Similar measures were taken in the southwestern city of Bordeaux.

Even before the attack, the Central Jewish Consistory in Paris had demanded that the government do more to protect its community.

“Without this we would have no choice but to consider the Jewish community as living through the beginnings of a new Kristallnacht, with the government totally passive,” the Consistory said in a statement.

In Germany on Nov 9, 1938 — since known as Kristallnacht — mobs launched a wave of anti-Jewish violence.

The latest French attack came on the same night as a synagogue was firebombed in Brussels in neighbouring Belgium, sparking fears of a more general European wave of such violence.

Violent crime in general has already established itself as the main issue three weeks ahead of the French presidential vote, and Chirac has seized on the issue to attack the record of Jospin’s government.

Its record on law and order was already under intense pressure after a lone gunman last week shot dead eight local councillors at a town hall meeting in a Parisian suburb in an attack which had no racist overtones.

Anti-Jewish attacks are especially embarrassing to France, which has been trying to downplay accusations from Israel and Jewish advocacy groups that it is an increasingly anti-Semitic country.

The conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians has raised tensions in France, where Europe’s largest Jewish population lives alongside some four million mainly-Muslim Arabs.

The Marseille fire was the latest in a weekend spate of acts:

— Synagogues in the central city of Lyon and the eastern city of Strasbourg were severely damaged in separate arson raids.

— A Jewish couple were roughed up by an anti-Semitic mob in Villeurbanne near Lyon.

— A man fired two shots from a shotgun at the front of a kosher butcher’s in the southern city of Toulouse.

— Marseille police arrested a 15-year-old boy for daubing anti-Jewish slogans around his school and trying to set fire to its library. —AFP