His appeal unleashed fury across the political spectrum yesterday, heightening unease among politicians and Jewish community leaders alike at the way Israeli government-funded groups have been using reports of the mounting anti-semitic climate in France to fuel an energetic programme to persuade French Jews to leave.

Although official figures show that attacks and threats of attacks are growing in frequency, there is no consensus among the Jewish community over whether the country has become a worse place for Jews to live. The reason why more Jews are leaving for Israel is hotly contested.

Almost all anti-semitic attacks are the work of disaffected youths from the large, disadvantaged Muslim communities, rather than the result of any historic anti-Jewish sentiment. Many observers fear that while the government focuses on the rise in attacks, it is failing to address the more fundamental issue of Muslim integration.

And there is growing anxiety that the significance of the relatively small exodus of French Jews is being exaggerated by Israel, as part of worsening diplomatic ties between the two nations.

“France is not an anti-semitic nation and Mr Sharon is simply settling scores with France through this question of anti-semitism,” Patrick Klugman, deputy president of SOS-Racisme and a former head of the Jewish students’ union, said yesterday.

Nevertheless, there has been an undeniable rise in French Jews ready to perform move to Israel. For the past two years more than 2,000 people have made the journey, double the number who have left each year since the early 1970s.

Provisional figures suggest that this year the numbers will rise a further 25%. Sandrine Cohen, 29, will be on the flight next Wednesday with her husband and her four young daughters aged between seven and 18 months. Pregnant with her fifth child, the optician decided in January that it was time to leave.

“Our family has been attacked several times in the past five years. We’ve been called dirty Jews in the street and we’ve been sent hate mail, and the police have failed to help us,” she said yesterday. “I’m well aware of the violence in Israel, but I’m scared for my daughters’ future in France. On balance, I think we’ll be safer there.”

Menahem Gourary, the Jewish Agency’s European director, has been working on a new drive to promote emigration to Israel. Named the Sarcelles project, after a rough Parisian suburb which is home to large Jewish and Arab communities, the campaign is targeted at residents of under-privileged parts of France  in Paris, Lyon and Marseille  where racial tensions are high.

Israel paid for dozens of representatives to travel to France, allowing the agency to set up permanent offshoots in some of these cities, so that information on emigration is readily available.

“France has failed to integrate its Muslim population, and these groups have focused much of their anti-French hatred against the Jews who live alongside them in some of France’s poorest suburbs,” Mr Gourary said.

With Europe’s largest Muslim population, at some 5 million, and its largest Jewish population (600,000), France has seen an escalation of religious conflict  often directly linked to violence in Israel.

Mr Gourary said: “We believe 95% of the attacks against Jews are committed by Muslims of North African origin; this is the problem which France has never addressed.”

The agency’s latest campaign is partly motivated by the need to stem an overall decline in migration to Israel, which has slowed now that the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union is over; last year there were fewer than 25,000 new arrivals, a 15-year low.

Neither Mr Sharon nor the Jewish Agency has accused the French government of state-sponsored anti-semitism, only of failing to address the problems which have triggered this rash of attacks.

“No one is making any comparison between the situation now and the Nazi period. But we are very upset by the growing number of attacks against children in schools and universities,” Mr Gourary said. “This isn’t a military campaign. There’s no door to door recruitment. We’re simply trying to respond to a growing demand.”

The agency is at pains to address the programme’s central paradox  that it is trying to help citizens leave a peaceful European nation to live in a conflict-torn, recession-mired region, where anti-Jewish attacks are much more bloody.

“Attacks in Israel are attacks against the state of Israel, not personal assaults. In Paris you are singled out as someone who is wearing a skullcap, singled out as a Jew, and this individual assault is harder to cope with,” explained Michael Jankelowitz, the Jewish Agency spokesman in Jerusalem.

Agency officials add that migration should not simply be viewed as a way of escaping anti-semitism at home, but as a positive decision to devote one’s energy to building the state of Israel.

Not everyone is happy once they arrive and some return after a few years, distressed by the violence or unable to find work, but the figure is put at below 10%.

Senior figures in the Jewish community have been angry at the way the rise in emigration figures has been trumpeted by the Israeli media as a clear indication of the worsening situation in France, pointing out that although the exodus has doubled, the figure remains small. Other European nations have seen a similar rise.

“France is xenophobic, not anti-semitic. People are suspicious of anyone foreign,” said Michael Grinberg, the proprietor of Goldenberg’s, a Jewish restaurant in the Marais quarter of Paris, which was bombed in 1982. “If Jews are emigrating it’s because they’re running away from other problems in France.”

Mr Chirac travelled to a village in the hills of south-western France famous for the bravery of its inhabitants who risked their lives during the second world war to shelter Jews from the Nazis and French collaborators.

As many as 5,000 people were saved from transportation to death camps as a result.

“Discrimination, anti-semitism, racism  all kinds of racism are spreading insidiously,” Mr Chirac said.

“I ask [the French] to remind their children of the mortal danger of fanaticism, of exclusion, of cowardliness and resignation to extremism  All these acts reflect the darkest side of human nature. They are unworthy of France. I will do everything to stop them.”

In a skilful piece of media management, the backdrop of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was chosen to remind the country of France’s shameful record on anti-semitism, while simultaneously evoking the memory of the few thousand villagers who resisted the climate of hatred.

Mr Chirac was accompanied by the former cabinet minister Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor.

The French government has this week stepped up its attempts to be seen to be tackling the unusual rise in xenophobic attacks that has shocked the country in recent months, and attracted bad publicity for France around the world.

At the end of April, 127 tombstones were desecrated at the Jewish cemetery in Herrlisheim-prhs-Colmar.

Although they have been disputed, official figures indicate that the number of anti-semitic attacks in France has been rising again this year, while Jewish commu nity leaders report a growing, albeit less quantifiable, sense of hostility.

“The anti-semitic atmosphere in France has become a real problem,” a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Paris said.

There has also been an apparent surge in attacks on Muslims, and Mr Chirac was careful to insist that all forms of racism must be stemmed. Last month neo-Nazi slogans were daubed across about 50 tombs in a Muslim cemetery in Strasbourg, while in April racist slogans were painted on the wall of a mosque in central France.

In a further indication of the government’s determination to be seen to be taking action, the interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, said earlier this week that “anti- semitic and racist acts are on the increase” and that the situation had become very serious. He promised that there would be heavy penalties in the event of future attacks.

Mr Chirac said yesterday it was the duty of teachers, police officers, mayors and local officials to stand firm against the trend.

“In the face of the risk of everyday indifference and passivity, I appeal solemnly for vigilance from each French woman and man,” Mr Chirac said.

The timing of Mr Chirac’s longest speech on internal affairs in recent months was met with cynicism by some commentators, who argued that the president had seized on an uncontentious and popular theme as part of his latest attempt to boost his crumbling popularity.

One recent poll showed that his rating had dropped 20 percentage points in 15 months  down from 65% last April (when it peaked after his opposition to the war in Iraq) to 45% in June.

“This has been Chirac’s strategy for the past nine years,” Le Parisien wrote yes terday. “Whenever his popularity drops, he tries to stop the decline with a sudden trip to the provinces.”

The newspaper added that the president’s public relations office, headed by his daughter Claude, was simply responding to a popular demand for a greater focus on internal affairs.

Mr Chirac also appeared to be attempting to claw back some of the immense support he won in 1995 when he became the first French president to accept France’s “criminal” complicity with the Nazis during the war.

Jewish leaders welcomed the general tone of his speech, although there was some frustration that the president had not focused in greater detail on the punishment that might be in store for the perpetrators of racist attacks.

The Interior Ministry registered 67 attacks on Jews or their property and 160 threats against Jews in the first quarter of this year, compared with 42 attacks and 191 threats in the last three months of 2003.