Israël Jefroykin

Origins and early life

Israël Jefroykin was born at Viekšniai in Lithuania on 24 January 1884, into a traditional Jewish family, and received the education that shaped a whole generation of eastern European Jews: Jewish learning, European liberal ideas and Zionism together, none of them cancelling the others.

Work and career

He settled in France and became president of the Fédération des sociétés juives de France, the body that grouped the mutual-aid societies of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants — the landsmanshaftn, burial societies and workers' circles through which newcomers without French, without money and often without papers found lodging, work and a doctor. That federation was the voice of immigrant Jewry in a country whose established Jewish institutions were run by families settled since the Revolution, and it did not always speak the same language as they did.

He was an honorary member of the executive committee of the World Jewish Congress. His elder brother was the Yiddish writer Zalman Jefroykin, and his son Jules, known as Dika, co-founded in May 1942 with Simon Levitte the Mouvement de jeunesse sioniste and took part in the financing of the Jewish resistance. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 12 April 1954.