קהילת יהודי צרפת

Dan Merzbach (1956-2011), rabbi and architect.

Born in France and brought to Israel by his parents in 1966. After his marriage, Merzbach became a member of the group that established the West Bank settlement of Otniel in 1984. He was trained as an architect and designed a number of public buildings, but he was also a practicing rabbi who established a beit midrash, a religious study hall, near his home and was among the founders of the Otniel Yeshivat Hesder, whose students combine religious study with military service.

Merzbach was killed by mistake when Israel Defense Forces soldiers fired on his car at a makeshift checkpoint when they suspected a possible terrorist attack. The car was being driven by him in the very early morning towards the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron where he had intended to participate in morning prayers. Two other passengers in the car were moderately wounded. The soldier who had fired the lethal shots was himself lightly injured when a passing Palestinian truck hit him as he spoke with one of the injured passengers. In recent years Mertzbach prayed regularly on Friday mornings at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a 20-minute drive from his home. This time he gave a ride to two women from the community, one of them a widow whose husband was shot and killed by terrorists in the area. Merzbach was a firm believer in the right of Jews to settle in all parts of Eretz Israel and was an effective and devoted educator who attracted many pupils.

Wilhelm Filderman (1882–1963), leader of the Romanian Jews, born in Bucharest, Romania. Filderman studied law in Paris, France. He returned to Romania and after teaching for two years at the Jewish high school in Bucharest, started his law practice in 1912. In 1913 he was elected to the central committee of the Union of Romanian Jews. During World War I Filderman was an officer in the Romanian army. At the Versailles Peace Conference he was chosen to be a member of the Comité des Délégations Juives. He demanded the total emancipation of the Jews and the inclusion of this principle in the peace treaty with Romania.

In 1920 Filderman became the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Romania and in 1923 was elected president of the Union of Romanian Jews. Between the two world wars, he fought antisemitism, and worked for the effective realization of full citizenship for the Jews. He published a number of books against antisemitism. He was opposed to a separate Jewish party. In 1927 Filderman was elected a member of the Romanian parliament on the Liberal Party list. From 1931 to 1933 he was the president of the Jewish Community of Bucharest, and in the same period he became president of the Federation of Jewish Communities. When the enlarged Jewish Agency was constituted in 1929, he was elected as a non-Zionist delegate to its founding congress in Zurich.

After 1940, when the anti-Semitic fascist symparthiser Ion Antonescu took over the leadership of the country, Filderman intervened with him as a representative of the Federation, several times obtaining the revocation of serious measures, such as the wearing of the yellow badge, the deportation of Romanian Jews to Nazi death camps in Poland, etc. At the beginning of 1942, when the Federation of Communities was dissolved, Filderman continued to write to authorities to denounce the racial measures. He was a member of the underground Jewish Council, formed of representatives of the principal Jewish trends. When he expressed his opposition to the special tax of four billion lei imposed on the Jews he was sent to Transnistria (March 1943), returning after three months through the intervention of the papal nuncio and the Swiss and Swedish ambassadors. Back in Bucharest, he immediately reported to the Romanian government on the terrible situation of the deportees in Transnistria and asked for their return, which was obtained at the end of the same year.

After the war, he again became president of the Federation of Communities and of the Union of Romanian Jews and representative of the JDC. He was however persecuted by the Communists, In 1948 he secretly left Romania and settled in Paris.

Henry Heiner Cassirer (1911-2004), journalist and writer, the son of art dealer Kurt Hans Cassirer (1883-1975), and his wife Eva Solmitz and grandson of industrialist Max Cassirer (1857-1943), born in Berlin, Germany. He spent his childhood with his aunt Edith, who was married to the reform teacher Paul Geheeb. He attended the Odenwald School near Frankfurt funded by his grandfather Max Cassirer and run by his aunt.

Cassirer fled to London, England, in 1936, studied at the London School of Economics and after graduation worked at the BBC for its services in German. In 1939 it was he who broadcast to Germany that Britain had declared war to the Third Reich. In 1940 he emigrated to the U.S. and worked at CBS. After a program about the UN Charter of Human Rights, he was approached by the UN and in 1948 he became the director of the Department of Education and Broadcasting of the new cultural organization UNESCO in Paris. He became Honorary President of the French organization for the disabled GIHP as he himself was partially paralyzed after a visit to India in 1956.

He considered himself a citizen of the world, and always refused to consider himself a German, or a Jew. He wrote a number of books on communications, broadcasting and education.

Jacob Israelsohn (1856-1924), writer and Semitic scholar, born in Jelgava, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). He received a traditional Jewish education but as a youth also learned Russian and German. From 1876 to 1883 he studied Semitics at the University of St Petersburg, Russia, specializing in Jewish-Arabic literature, but he could not be appointed to the faculty since he was a Jew. He therefore worked as a writer, translator and secretary to the Jewish community of St Petersburg and philanthropy assistant to the wealthy Polyakov family of Moscow.

In 1922 he moved to Brussels, Belgium, and then to France where he helped Joseph Derenbourg in his research into Judeo-Arabic material. He also assisted in the preparation of the defence of Menachem Beilis ex-soldier and the father of five children, employed as a superintendent at the Zaitsev brick factory in Kiev who in 1913 amidst an surge of Anti-Semitic feeling was accused of the ritual murder of an Ukrainian child. He persuaded a number of Russian intellectuals to give evidence in the trial.

Israelsohn's publications included a Russian translation and commentary of Josephus' “The Jewish Wars”, an edition of Samuel ben Hophni's commentary on the end of Genesis and of Yahya ibn Bal'am's commentary of Jeremiah.

Israel Levi (1856-1939), scholar and chief rabbi of France, born in Paris. In 1882 he was appointed assistant rabbi and began to teach Jewish history at the Ecole Rabbinique in 1892 and Talmud at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1896. In 1880 he became secretary of the new Societe des Etudes Juives. In 1886 he was made editor of the "Revue des Etudes Juives". From 1919 to 1938 he was chief rabbi of the French Consistoire.

Levi was an intellectual who comtributed to many aspects of modern Jewish scholarship and in particular that which concerned the Jews of France. He was a regular contributor to learned journals, especially the "Revue des Etudes Juives", for which he revued almost every new book of Jewish scholarship.

Roger Ikor (1912–1986), writer, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1955, born in Paris, France, to parents of Lithuanian origin. He studied and and later became professor of literature at the Lycee Condorcet and the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, outside Paris. In June 1940, he was taken prisoner of war by the Germans, and was sent to Pomerania. His best known work was "Le Fils d'Avrom" ("The son of Avrom"), which describes the lives of Jewish immigrants to France during the early part of the 20th century. It tells the story of a Jewish family which settled in Paris, and was bound by blood to a non-Jewish French family. Spanning three generations, the story describes the relationship that the family with their new home. Ikor clearly favours Jewish assimilation into the surrounding culture. For this work he was awarded the Prix Goncourt. His stories usually epic tell the workers' uprising of June 1848 (1936), and the history of Saint-Just (1937). He returned to the question of assimilation in his 1968 essay “Peut-on etre juif aujourd'hui?” ("Can one be a Jew today?"), which discusses the question in the light of the establishment of the State of Israel and the reawakening of Jewish consciousness amongst Jewish intellectuals. In this esay he makes certain concessions to the “outdated folklore” of Judaism. A moderate socialist and a liberal writer, his views were closer to the 19th century than the 20th century.

After the death of his son, who committed suicide after joining the Zen macrobiotic cult, he led, until his death, a struggle against the cult phenomenon, and the Center Against Mind Control (CSCM).

לאון בלום (1872-1950), מדינאי צרפתי, נולד בפריס, צרפת, למד משפטים בפריס וזכה למוניטין כמשורר וסופר. משנת 1896 עד 1919 שירת בממשלה כיועץ משפטי במועצת המדינה. בלום נמשך למפלגה הסוציאליסטית, ועד מהרה הפך לאחד ממנהיגיה. בשנת 1921 ייסד עיתון סוציאליסטי- לה פופולייר.

בשנת 1934 לנוכח האיום פשיסטי, הוא ארגן חזית עממית של השמאל וביוני 1936 הפך לראש הממשלה היהודי הראשון של צרפת. ממשלתו הציגה את רפורמות נועזות שכללו שבוע עבודה בן 40 שעות, חופשות בתשלום, והלאמת תעשיות המלחמה והבנק של צרפת. ביוני 1937 הובס בלום, אבל נבחר שוב לראש הממשלה לתשעה חודשים ב-1938.
ב- 1938 הוא הקים את הוועדה הסוציאליסטית הפרו הציונית לפלסטינה.

כאשר כבשו הגרמנים את צרפת בשנת 1940, הם עצרו את בלום והאשימו אותו בתמיכה במלחמה. בלום הועמד לדין בשנת 1942 וניהל קרב הגנה מבריק שאילץ את הגרמנים להשעות את המשפט. בלום נשלח למחנה ריכוז, ממנו הוא שוחרר על ידי הצבא האמריקאי ב1945.
הוא חידש את הקריירה הפוליטית שלו והתמנה לראש ממשלת צרפת בשנת 1946 לתקופה של חודש.

Rothschild, James Jacob Mayer (1792-1868), banker, founder of the French branch of the Rothschild family, born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, the youngest child of Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

Rothschild moved to Paris in 1811 and in 1817 opened de Rothschild Frères. An advisor to two kings of France, he became the most powerful banker in the country and following the Napoleonic Wars, played a major role in financing the construction of railroads, industries, factories, shipping, and mining interests which helped make France an industrial power. Rothschild amassed a fortune that made him one of the richest men in the world. In 1822 James de Rothschild, along with his four brothers, was bestowed the hereditary title of "Freiherr" (Baron) by Emperor Francis I of Austria. That same year he was appointed consul-general of the Austrian Empire, and in 1823 was awarded the French Legion of Honor. King Louis XVIII refused to receive James' wife at court because she was not Christian. As a result Rothschild refused to do business with the king. Following the July 1830 Revolution which saw King Louis-Philippe come to power, James de Rothschild put together a loan package to stabilize the finances of the new government, and in 1834 a second loan. In gratitude for his services to the French nation, Louis-Philippe elevated him to a grand officer of the Legion of Honor.

In addition to his banking business, in 1868 James de Rothschild purchased Château Lafite, one of France's most outstanding vineyards. Located in the Bordeaux region, it is a business that remains in the family to this day. James de Rothschild and his sophisticated Viennese wife were at the center of Parisian culture. They patronized major personalities in the arts, including Gioacchino Rossini, Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Delacroix, and Heinrich Heine. Beyond his business activities, James de Rothschild made the first significant acquisitions for what became the French family's massive art collections. His art included Vermeer's 1668 work "The Astronomer", which remained in the family until it became the property of the Louvre in the 1970s. He also used his enormous wealth for philanthropic works and became a leader of the French Jewish community. James's contributions to France, along with those of his offspring can be found in many fields, including medicine and the arts.

Sons Alphonse and Gustave took the reins of a vast French business empire, whose industrial interests spread as far afield as Africa and the South Sea Islands.

Jozsef Vago(1877-1947), architect, born in Nagyvarad, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Oradea in Romania) and completed his studies at the Polytechnicum in Budapest. As a student, he was awarded a prize for the plan of a synagogue in Budapest.

Until 1911 he worked with his older brother, architect Laszlo Vago. Later Jozsef became the associate of the leading Hungarian architect O. Lechner. Vago prefered the modern style with the clean uncluttered lines then in vogue. Many buildings in the Hungarian capital were designed by him. In 1919 he settled in Switzerland and later relocated to Italy.

He died in Salies-de-Béarn, France.

Moïse (Mojzesz) Kisling (1891-1953), painter, born in Krakow, Poland (then part of Austria-Hungary). He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Krakow, and then moved to France in 1910 settling in Paris.

Kisling resided first in Montmartre and after a few years he moved to Montparnasse where he became a member of an artists' community made up of immigrants from various countries in eastern Europe as well as from USA and Britain.

Kisling volunteered to serve in the French Foreign Legion during WW1. After having been seriously wounded in the Battle of the Somme (1915), he was awarded French citizenship.

A member of the School of Paris, Kisling lived and worked in Montparnasse and was close friends with his neighbors, Amedeo Modigliani and Jules Pascin, and other distinguished artists. Kisling earned the widest acclaim for his surreal nudes and portraits.

Kisling volunteered for army service again in 1940 during World War II, although he was 49. He was discharged from the French army at the time of the surrender Nazi Germany.
Kisling immigrated to the United States. In the USA he exhibited in New York and Washington, DC. Eventually he settled in California living there until 1946, when he returned to France where he died seven years later at Sanary-sur-Mer, near Toulon, on the French Riviera.