Arthur Weisweiller

Origins and early life

Arthur Weisweiller was born at Ville-d'Avray on 14 June 1877 and died at Antibes on 15 October 1941. He was the son of Charles Léopold Weisweiller, founder of the bank that bore the family name, and he followed his father into banking while becoming, in the judgement of the art historian Pierre Rosenberg, a great collector; Raoul Dufy painted the mural decorations of the salon of his villa L'Altana at Antibes in 1928.

He sat on the Consistoire central israélite de France, the governing body of French Judaism, and in 1935 he founded the École Maïmonide at Boulogne-Billancourt, the first Jewish secondary school in France, which still bears that name and still teaches. He had married Betty Rachel Julie Deutsch de la Meurthe on 7 May 1907; she was deported to Auschwitz after his death.

Work and career

His sister Jeanne and her husband Jacques Helbronner, who presided over the Consistoire central, were deported to Auschwitz in November 1943 and did not return. What he built for the education of Jewish children in France outlived both the family bank and the catastrophe that struck his household.