Charles Merzbach

Origins and early life

Charles Ezriel Merzbach was born in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris on 6 December 1913 and died on 7 June 1985 in a road accident in the Negev; he is buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Work and career

His father was not very observant, but he himself became strictly observant and grew into one of the significant figures of the Orthodox Jewish community of Paris. He was a physician by profession, and he also served as a mohel, publishing in 1952 a guide to the brit milah that gave French-speaking families a clear account of the rite. He founded the study circle named after Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, the thirteenth-century talmudist who defended the Talmud in the disputation of 1240 and then left for the Land of Israel.

After the war he lent his property, the château d'Ambloy, to a relief organisation caring for Jewish children, many of them orphaned by the deportations.

Personal life

He married Suzanne Meyer in 1940 and they had eleven children, five sons and six daughters. He took part in the public debates of 1966 over Jean-François Steiner's book Treblinka, and he settled in Jerusalem in 1967.