Robert Ejness, Director General of CRIF. Photo: Video Screenshot.

The number of Jews enrolled in France’s public school system has decreased significantly as parents seek to protect their children from Muslim students, a French Jewish security official told international channel VICE News on Tuesday.

Robert Ejness, director general of CRIF, French Jewry’s umbrella organization, said that Jewish parents are “very worried and questioning the future of their children in this country.”

Ejness explained:

This is an unstable situation that we’ve not known in the past. In 1970, only 7,000 French kids went to Jewish schools. Today, it’s 35,000 and 35,000 are going to Christian schools…One of the issues is the integration of the Muslim population…that has arrived in France in the last 20-30 years which has not been integrated, which has refused also to be integrated in the French system.

Despite the shock the nation felt following the January, 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, Ejness said, he believes antisemitic attacks in France will continue to rise. “The numbers for last year [were] very high — over 900 antisemitic acts — and we believe this year will not better,” he said.

While some Jewish parents have taken steps to protect their children inside the country’s public school system, others are leaving France completely, according to Paul Fitoussi, headmaster of the Lucien De Hirsch School — the oldest Jewish school in France and one of the largest in Europe. Fitoussi told VICE News that over the course of the last year, 36 percent of families who had their children enrolled in the school “left… to go to Israel.”

Watch the full interviews below: