Frédéric-Shimon Hammel

Origins and early life

Frédéric-Shimon Hammel was born at Strasbourg on 8 September 1907 into an assimilated Jewish family, and came to a serious Jewish life at fourteen through his meeting with a rabbi; in 1928 he joined the Éclaireurs israélites de France, the Jewish scout movement, and took the totem name Chameau, the camel, by which the resistance knew him.

Work and career

He built youth centres that were in fact shelters: an agricultural centre at Taluyers in the summer of 1941, then La Pierre Blanche in the Ardèche, places where Jewish adolescents could live and work and be out of sight while the round-ups ran. With his wife, whose totem was Fourmi, and with the scouts' founder Robert Gamzon, he took Jewish refugees across the Spanish border, and he went on with the rescue work after an arrest, until the liberation of France.

What he had built was not an improvisation but a network of farms, workshops and false papers, run by young people barely older than the children they hid. After the war he and his family emigrated to Israel, to the religious kibbutz Ein HaNatziv of the Mizrahi movement, where he taught chemistry. He died at Beit She'an on 16 July 2001, at ninety-three.