Léon Zadoc-Kahn

Origins and early life

Léon Zadoc-Kahn was born in Paris on 2 September 1870, son of Zadoc Kahn, chief rabbi of France, in the year the Republic was proclaimed and the year his father's generation believed the emancipation had finally taken hold.

Work and career

He became a physician and was chief physician of the Rothschild hospital in Paris from 1914 to 1943, twenty-nine years, treating the Jewish poor of the eastern arrondissements, the immigrants from Poland and Russia, and then the refugees from Germany. He presided over the central committee of the Keren Hayesod in France, the fund that bought land and built in the Land of Israel, so that the son of the chief rabbi who had received Herzl in Paris carried on that thread.

In November 1943 he and his wife Suzanne were in hiding near Paris; they were arrested on 1 November, held at Drancy, and deported by convoy 62 on 20 November 1943. Both were murdered on arrival at Auschwitz on 23 November 1943. He was seventy-three, and had spent his working life inside a hospital founded by Jews to treat anyone who came.