Denise Gamzon

Origins and early life

Denise Gamzon was born Denise Lévy in the tenth arrondissement of Paris on 26 April 1909, daughter of Maximilien Lévy and Sophie Bernheim of Mulhouse.

Work and career

She came to her own Jewishness in an unexpected place: studying in Germany in the years when German antisemitism was becoming a programme, she became aware, as her memoirs put it, of her Jewish roots. She married Robert Gamzon, who had founded the Éclaireurs israélites de France, the Jewish scouts, in 1923, and became a scout leader herself. Under the Occupation the movement turned into one of the principal instruments of rescue, and she organised the children's homes: farms and houses in the unoccupied zone where Jewish children were fed, taught and, as the round-ups reached them, dispersed under false names into the surrounding countryside.

She was part of the organised Jewish resistance in France, work that has often been described as her husband's and was in large part hers.

Personal life

The Gamzons made their aliyah in the summer of 1949, first to kibbutz Sde Eliyahu; she later taught French at Tel Aviv University until 1977, settled in Jerusalem and published her memoirs in 1997. She died there on 26 October 2002, at ninety-three.