Léon Nisand

Origins and early life

Léon Nisand was born Léon Neugewurtz at Strasbourg on 28 September 1923, eldest son of Ernest and Rose Nisand, traditionally observant Jewish shopkeepers of that city, and died at Schiltigheim on 6 June 2014, at ninety.

Work and career

He was a young man in Alsace when the war came, which for a Jewish family there meant expulsion into the interior of France or worse, and he took part in the resistance. He qualified in medicine in 1950 and worked as a physician and haematologist, directing medical laboratories at Colmar and Mulhouse between 1955 and 1965. In 1960 he was among the founders of the French family planning movement and became its vice-president, at a period when contraception was still illegal in France under the law of 1920 and doctors who advised on it were breaking it; the law was changed only in 1967.

That work put a doctor from an observant Jewish household at the centre of one of the great social arguments of the French twentieth century, on the side of letting women decide. He belonged to the generation of Alsatian Jews who rebuilt their community after the war and were also entirely engaged in the general life of the country.