Liliane Ackermann

Origins and early life

Liliane Ackermann was born Liliane Aimée Weil at Strasbourg on 3 September 1938, in the Jewish community of Alsace, and died in the same city on 3 February 2007.

Work and career

She was a small child when the war came; her family found refuge at Voiron, in the Isère, and returned to Strasbourg in 1956. She married Doctor Henri Ackermann in 1959 and they had seven children; from 1972 they together directed the Yechouroun youth movement of Strasbourg. She taught Jewish studies at every level, to children, to adolescents and to adults, for more than fifty years, while at the same time lecturing in biochemistry and microbiology at the university from 1976 to 1996 — she held two doctorates from Strasbourg, in microbiology in 1974 and in the humanities in 1999.

Her books came out of the meeting of those two lives: Thora, Science: l'Unité in 1991, Le Monde juif au féminin in 2003 on the place of women in Jewish tradition, and an Essai sur la conversion in 2006. She gave much of her time to the disabled, to women in distress and to the elderly of her community, work of which little is written down.