Over a period of just three years, roughly half the Jewish families in Villepinte have left. Some have gone to other suburbs or Paris neighborhoods considered safer for Jews; a few have left the country. Of 300 families three years ago, only 150 remain today, community president Charly Hannoun estimates. The reason, he says, is anti-Semitism.

Now Villepinte’s 40-year-old synagogue, which was torched in 1991 and 2001, is at risk of closing because there are barely enough regulars for a minyan. Jewish community leaders are wondering if Jews have a future here. “It’s a whole history that’s being erased,” says Hannoun, who worked with contractors and friends to build the town’s synagogue. “It’s the end of the synagogue, and I say that with rage in my heart.”

Villepinte is one stark example of what is happening to many Jewish communities in the immigrant-heavy suburbs of the Seine-Saint-Denis region, north of Paris. Scarred by the surge in anti-Semitism that swept through France between 2000 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of the mostly Sephardic Jews who once lived in these close-knit communities have left town.

Sammy Ghozlan, the president of the Seine-Saint-Denis Council of Jewish Communities, says more than 16,000 Jews have moved out of the suburbs since 2001. Left behind are synagogues weighing whether to close and mostly poor, elderly and religious Jewish families.

Experts say the Jewish flight from the suburbs is changing the demographics of France’s Jewish community and increasing the ghettoization of Jews in the country. All of France is experiencing the problem, says University of Paris sociologist Shmuel Trigano, the author of “The Future of the Jews in France.” “It is a general shift, not a passing crisis,” Trigano says. “The Jewish community is becoming a ghetto. It is no longer a community of choice but a community of necessity. In a democracy that shouldn’t happen.”

Though increased security has helped reduce anti-Semitic crime in France, bringing the level of anti-Jewish incidents in poorer suburbs down to the levels in Paris, the change has come too late for many suburban Jews fed up with worrying about what might happen.

Altabe says he recently had a glass bottle thrown at him from a passing car while walking with his 3-year-old child. “If you hit us over the head enough times, we’ll protect ourselves,” says Marc Djebali, the president of the Sarcelles Jewish community, north of Paris. Djebali says the Sarcelles community of 10,000 Jews lost about one-fifth of its population over the last decade.

“We don’t attack,” he says. “The Jews just take their bags and they go.”