Muslim Nanny Who Tried to Poison Jewish Family Is Acquitted of Antisemitism Charge

Despite spewing anti-Jewish rhetoric, the French appeals court denied an Algerian caretaker was driven by Jew hatred.

The decision by the Versailles Court of Appeal comes months after the nanny, identified as Leïla Y., 42, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison by the Nanterre criminal court in December for attempting to poison the Jewish family she worked for with cleaning supplies.

The family’s lawyers, Patrick Klugman and Sacha Ghozlan, decried the ruling in a press release, saying that they would seek to appeal the decision again.

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“This decision makes judicial repression of antisemitism impossible and turns legal texts, meant to be protective, into mere useless scraps of paper,” Klugman and Ghozlan said. “Faced with such a decision, litigants risk losing all confidence in and protection from the judicial institution.”

The family’s lawyers also called on the French Minister of Justice and the National School for the Judiciary to “thoroughly review both initial and ongoing training of judges in combating racism and antisemitism,” and urged the prosecutor general to file an appeal “in the interest of society.”

Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, called the ruling “incomprehensible” in a post on X, adding that it “raises questions about the willful blindness in French society toward antisemitism when it forms the backdrop of cases without being the sole element.”

Despite the nanny’s comments, the Nanterre court rejected the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism in the case, and the Versailles Court of Appeal ruled in its latest decision that the nanny’s remarks did not constitute antisemitic statements.

The family’s lawyers, Patrick Klugman and Sacha Ghozlan, decried the ruling in a press release, saying that they would seek to appeal the decision again.

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“This decision makes judicial repression of antisemitism impossible and turns legal texts, meant to be protective, into mere useless scraps of paper,” Klugman and Ghozlan said. “Faced with such a decision, litigants risk losing all confidence in and protection from the judicial institution.”

The family’s lawyers also called on the French Minister of Justice and the National School for the Judiciary to “thoroughly review both initial and ongoing training of judges in combating racism and antisemitism,” and urged the prosecutor general to file an appeal “in the interest of society.”

Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, called the ruling “incomprehensible” in a post on X, adding that it “raises questions about the willful blindness in French society toward antisemitism when it forms the backdrop of cases without being the sole element.”

“Are there contexts that make antisemitic remarks acceptable to the point that the justice system refuses to see them?” Arfi continued. “This legitimation of antisemitism is one more step in its tragic banalization since October 7.”

The ruling comes amid a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in France since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza and follows several high-profile court cases in recent years that have sparked outcry within the country’s Jewish community about how the French judiciary prosecutes antisemitism.

On Thursday, French lawmakers withdrew an antisemitism bill hours before it was set for debate that would have made it illegal to “implicitly” condone or incite terrorism or call for the destruction of a state recognized by France.

Muslim Nanny Tries to Poison Jewish Family, Appeals Court Acquits Her of Antisemitism Charge

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Apr 21, 2026;

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In a ludicrous decision, a French appeals court has just acquitted a Muslim nanny who tried to poison the Jewish family she worked for of charges of antisemitism. More on this story can be found here: “French appeals court rules that Algerian nanny who poisoned Jewish family not antisemitic,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, April 16, 2026:

A French appeals court has ruled that an Algerian nanny convicted of poisoning a Jewish family was not antisemitic.

As previously covered by The Jerusalem Post in December 2025, an Algerian nanny was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment for poisoning a French Jewish family for whom she was working.

The nanny, 42, was watching over three children, who were two, five, and seven years old, in January 2024, when a criminal complaint against the nanny was first filed.

The children’s parents launched the complaint after noticing that a bottle of their grape juice smelled of bleach. The nanny reportedly told police that she “never should have worked for a Jewish woman.”

What was that Jewish family thinking? Did they not know, did they remain blissfully aware, that Muslims are taught — see the Qur’an, see the hadith — that Jews are the “strongest in enmity to Muslims”? Had they not noticed the Muslims murdering Jews in France? Had they forgotten the attack on Jo Goldenberg’s kosher restaurant in the Marais? The murder of Ilan Halimi by a Muslim gang? Of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi, who was beaten and then thrown to her death by a Muslim neighbor she had befriended? Of Mireille Knoll, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor? Of the four Jewish shoppers and workers gunned down at the Hyper Cacher market at the Porte de Vincennes? Of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two sons Aryeh (5), and Gabriel (3), and another child, Myriam Monsonego (8), whom an Islamic terrorist, Mohammed Merah, murdered at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, France? What made them think this Algerian woman was somehow free of the hatred of Jews that so many Muslims nurture in their bosoms? Hiring her was a stunning display of dangerous naivete.

Nanterre court at the time dismissed the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism on procedural grounds, stating that her comments were made too late after the poisoning and were not recorded in the presence of a lawyer.

Why would it matter when her incriminating statements were made, whether they were made when she was first interrogated by the police, or a few weeks later? When first brought in for questioning, she lied, but later, after the psychological pressure of repeated interrogations by the police, she told the truth.

Central to the appeal was the nanny’s comment that “because they have money and power, I should never have worked for a Jewish woman, she only brought me problems.”

However, on April 15, the Versailles Court of Appeal reconsidered the December judgment, upholding the nanny’s conviction while again excluding the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism.

Look, the nanny was no fool. She was just like many millions of Muslims who, while living in the West, are of course prepared to deny any malign views of Jews. She could smile, and smile, and be a villain. She knew what the Qur’an said about Jews: as Infidels, they are “the most vile of created beings.” They should not be taken as friends. As Jews, from the earliest days of Islam, they were “the strongest in enmity toward Muslims.” Many Muslims even believe that Jews murdered Muhammad by poisoning him.

In sum, a Muslim nanny was found to have put poison in the food of a Jewish family, not because they mistreated her, but simply because they were Jews. Yet the Versailles Court of Appeal claims antisemitism was not a motive.

The nanny wasn’t exactly law-abiding. She ignored her order to deport. She used a forged Belgian identity card which she produced whenever French authorities might choose to question her. She was a practiced hand at deception..

It didn’t take long — she was just two months on the job — for the Muslim nanny to attempt to kill members of the family, beginning with the mother. Lysol or something similar was put into the wife’s wine, and she even mixed some kind of sinister substance in the mother’s makeup remover, no doubt hoping to blind her.

She figured it would be best to confess to putting some substance into the food, but carefully misidentified it as a “soapy lotion” — meaning it was essentially harmless, if unpleasant to the taste. After all, don’t old-fashioned parents threaten their children that if they don’t watch their language, “their mouths will be washed out with soap?”

She told police: “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.” You can believe her claim if you want to, but many of us remain convinced that’s exactly what she hoped to do — to kill, by poison, every member of that family.

Just like the kidnapper-killers of Ilan Halimi, who were convinced that “all Jews are rich” and so could afford to pay the ransom they demanded, this nanny believed that “all Jews.have money and power.” And that is why she should never have been employed to work for them: the sight of those Jews enjoying all that money and power was too much for this woman to bear. “They hath a daily beauty in their lives that makes mine ugly.”

Her lawyer wanted the judges to ignore her statement about Jews — not just these Jews she tried to poison but all Jews — having “money and power,” and her deep resentment at such a state of affairs, when it is Muslims who should have the power, and the money, and Jews should endure the painful status of dhimmis.

Of course, she denied any hint of antisemitism. What else could she say? She harbors not a hint of “antisemitism,” she assures the judge, even if she was keenly aware of how deeply wrong it was for her, a Muslim, to be in the employ of ”rich Jews” rather than with the roles reversed.

Sarah Halimi was a victim of a murderous antisemitism. The French family whose wine and food were poisoned by a Muslim nanny full of hatred for her Jewish employers’ well-being, were victims of her resentful antisemitism. In both cases the verdict was wrong. Kabili Traore, the man who murdered Sarah Halimi, was never sent to prison, where he belonged for the rest of his life, but instead to a much more comfortable asylum from which, if he is eventually deemed “cured” of his supposed mental illness, may be released back into society. Both at the court in Nanterre and at the appeals court in Versailles, the Muslim nanny managed to get off with an infuriatingly short sentence of 2 ½ years, far less than what she would have received had her antisemitic motive been recognized. In both cases, justice was not done.