Edmond Elalouf

Origins and early life

Edmond Elalouf was born in 1930 at Fès, in Morocco, in a traditional Jewish family of the mellah, the old Jewish quarter of the city, and died on 4 January 2025 at the age of ninety-four; the sources call him a major figure of French Judaism. He came to Paris in 1946 and studied at the École normale israélite orientale, the teachers' college of the Alliance israélite universelle, then directed by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

He went back to teach in Morocco in the 1950s and helped to open a community centre at Fès in 1956, before the departure of Moroccan Jewry brought him to France in 1962.

Recognition

That same year he was at the origin of the Département éducatif de la jeunesse juive, which trained the youth leaders of a community rebuilding itself, and he went on to help create the Centre communautaire de Paris, of which he remained honorary president under its later name of ECUJE. He was among the founders of the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, and he directed the collection Présence du judaïsme at the publisher Albin Michel. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2010, and he was buried at Bagneux.