Isaac Schneersohn

Origins and early life

Isaac Schneersohn was born on 14 March 1879 at Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine into the Chabad-Lubavitch hasidic dynasty; he was ordained a rabbi at sixteen and a half and served as a crown rabbi in Russia before fleeing the revolution of 1917.

Work and career

He reached France around 1920, took French nationality, went into business as a company director, and kept a salon frequented by Jewish intellectuals. What he did in 1943 is why he is remembered. Hiding in Grenoble under the Italian occupation, with the deportations under way and the war still undecided, he gathered forty representatives of Jewish organisations in an apartment and persuaded them to begin collecting the documents of their own persecution while it was happening: German orders, prefectural circulars, police files, testimony.

That clandestine effort became the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, established openly in Paris after the Liberation in 1944, and its archives served the Nuremberg trials and every historian of the Holocaust since. He also drove the building of the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, inaugurated in Paris in 1956, the first monument of its kind in Europe. He presided over the CDJC and edited its review Le Monde juif until his death, and received the Legion of Honour in 1958. The institutions he founded are today the Mémorial de la Shoah. He died in Paris on 24 June 1969.