Marc Breuer

Origins and early life

Marc Breuer was born at Frankfurt am Main on 19 November 1912, an Orthodox Jewish educator of German, French and later American life: he was the eldest son of Rabbi Joseph Breuer and a great-great-grandson of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder of German neo-Orthodoxy.

Work and career

As a German national in France in 1939 he was among the fifteen thousand men summoned to the Colombes stadium on 6 September and interned there as an enemy alien, an absurdity that put religious Jews behind wire as Germans; inside, they formed prayer quorums and study circles. Under the German occupation he worked with Théo Klein and others to reorganise the Yechouroun youth movement, and from 1941 to 1942 they set up correspondence courses in Judaism and holiday camps for the Jewish young people scattered and isolated across occupied France — an education carried on by post because the pupils could not be brought together.

Out of those courses came his book La Thora commentée, published in 1945 and 1946, based on Samson Raphael Hirsch's commentary on the Bible. Elie Wiesel's memoirs name him among the men who gave spiritual guidance in those years. He died in New York on 12 January 2002.