Léon Siritzky

Israël Siroshkine was born in Mykolaiv in 1887 and fled the pogroms, opened a cinema in Constantinople, and reached France in the early 1920s — choosing, as his grandson tells it, the country of Émile Zola, the man who got Dreyfus acquitted. Under the name Léon Siritzky he revived dying halls, built out through Les Cinémas de l'Est and Les Cinémas de la Côte Basque, and by 1938 held the third-largest circuit in France after Gaumont and Pathé, including the Max Linder, the Marivaux, the Moulin-Rouge and the Olympia. Vichy barred Jews from owning cinemas; the family sold at ruinous prices and fled to New York, and the theatres were folded into a circuit built out of property taken from Jews. When he came back in 1946 to reclaim them, the French state accused him of collaboration and had him imprisoned rather than return the assets. He was amnestied in 1951 and got back five theatres. His sons Samy and Jo started again from nothing in 1950 and rebuilt the third-largest circuit in France.