Coralie Cahen

Origins and early life

Coralie Cahen was born Coralie Lévy at Nancy on 21 June 1832, in a Jewish family of Lorraine, and died in the sixth arrondissement of Paris on 9 March 1899.

Work and career

At eighteen she married Mayer Cahen, physician-in-chief of the Rothschild hospital; her father-in-law Moïse Cahen had been president of the Israelite Consistory of Paris from 1832 to 1852, so that she entered by marriage the small world that ran the charitable institutions of French Jewry, and then reshaped part of it. She founded the maison de refuge pour l'enfance israélite, a shelter for Jewish children left without family or means at a period when the state provided almost nothing and orphaned children of the poor generally disappeared into workhouses or worse.

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 she went to the front and worked with the wounded, at an age and in a class where that was not expected of a woman.

Recognition

She was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1889, an unusual distinction for a woman then and rarer still for a Jewish woman whose public life had been entirely charitable. She and Mayer Cahen had one daughter, Lucie.