Bernard Picard

Origins and early life

Bernard Picard was born at Colmar, in the Haut-Rhin, in 1925 and died in Israel in 1998, at the age of seventy-two; the sources describe him as a French Jewish educator whose influence in the Jewish community of France was considerable.

Work and career

He came out of the Orthodox youth movement Yechouroun, which had formed a generation of Alsatian Jews before and during the war. In 1945 he married Marianne Schwab, who shared his vocation and worked at his side for the whole of their lives. From 1950 to 1965 he directed the École Lucien-de-Hirsch in Paris, and from 1965 to 1992 the École Yabné, the two Jewish schools that carried much of the religious and secular education of Parisian Jewry after the war.

He belonged to the generation that had to rebuild Jewish schooling in France on ground that the deportations had emptied, and to persuade parents that a Jewish education was again possible in French. In 1983 he received the Jerusalem Prize for Jewish education in the diaspora. He and his wife settled in Israel in 1992, at the end of forty-two years spent in the classrooms of Paris.