Claude-Annie Gugenheim

Origins and early life

Claude-Annie Gugenheim was born in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris on 23 August 1928 and died in Jerusalem on 20 June 2014, at the age of eighty-five.

Work and career

She began her studies at the Séminaire israélite de France in October 1947, in the years when French Jewry was rebuilding its teaching institutions after the destruction of the war. She married Grand Rabbi Ernest Gugenheim, who directed that seminary and who died on 27 March 1977, and among their six children was Michel Gugenheim, later chief rabbi of Paris. Her own vocation was the training of teachers: she was editor-in-chief of HaMoré, the quarterly review for Jewish educators founded in 1957, and she shaped a generation of teachers in French Jewish schools.

She translated and edited religious texts for a French readership, notably La Michna: Pirké Avot in 1988, and she published La Passion de transmettre in 2008, a title that names exactly what she did. She also edited her husband's correspondence on the study of the Torah, so that a private exchange between scholars became a document of French Jewish learning.