President Francois Hollande called the attack an “unspeakable act”.
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The Tuesday attack was the third assault to take place in Marseille in recent months.
Speaking to journalists, Mr Ammar said he had advised the Jewish community to temporarily stop wearing the kippa or yarmulke but this is not to give in to terrorism or these barbarians but exclusively to save human lives.
Some Jewish leaders rejected the call, with France’s chief rabbi, Haïm Korsia, saying: “We should not give an inch, we should continue wearing the kippa”.
Jewish communities in the French city of Marseilles are torn over whether Jews should continue to openly wear kippot in light of ongoing antisemitic attacks in the area.
A French judge has handed preliminary charges of “attempted assassination linked to a terrorist organization” to a machete-wielding teen who attacked a Jewish teacher, in an incident that prompted Jewish officials in Marseille to ask fellow Jews to refrain from wearing their traditional skull cap to stay safe.
Zvi Ammar said his call to abandon the kippah “until better days” caused him great pain. “As soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death”.
Brice Hortefeux of the centre-right Republicans party agreed with the chief rabbi that “giving up (the kippa) is giving in”.
Joel Mergui, president of France’s Israelite Central Consistory, said: “If we have to give up wearing any distinctive sign of our identity, it clearly would raise the question of our future in France”.
The latest stabbing in Marseille came just days after France held memorial events for those killed in the Paris attacks last January.
Jewish individuals “should decide whether to wear a hat on top of their kippah, depending on the situation, but removing one’s kippah seems unwarranted”, Teboul said.
France has been under a state of emergency following the terror attack in November that left 130 people dead.
Some 70,000 Jews live inMarseille, making it the second largest Jewish community of France after Paris and his region. In November, a Jewish teacher was stabbed in the name of IS while three attackers shouted anti-Semitic insults.
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There were 84 per cent more reported anti-Semitic attacks in France in January-May 2015 than in the same period the previous year and they included the murder of four people in a kosher supermarket in the wake of the January’s attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine.
