Marc Jarblum

Origins and early life

Marc Mordehaï Jarblum was born in Warsaw, then in the Russian Empire, on 24 January 1887, and was one of the founders in Poland of Poale Zion, the movement that joined socialism to Zionism.

Work and career

He settled in France before the First World War and became the central figure of immigrant Jewish life there, president of the Fédération des sociétés juives de France, which grouped the mutual-aid societies of the Yiddish-speaking newcomers, and a member of the leadership of the World Jewish Congress and of the Jewish Agency. Under the Occupation he went to the unoccupied zone and organised and financed rescue: money raised abroad, chiefly from the American Joint Distribution Committee, passed through his hands to the networks hiding children and to the Jewish resistance.

He refused to work with the UGIF, the single Jewish body imposed by Vichy and the occupier, holding that an organisation registered by the persecutor could not protect anyone, and he said so publicly at a time when that was a minority position. After the Gestapo raid on the UGIF offices in Lyon he escaped to Switzerland on 9 March 1943 and continued to direct the funding from there.

Later years

He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1948, presided over the Zionist Organisation of France, settled in Israel in 1953, sat on the executive of the Histadrut until 1964, and died at Bnei Brak on 7 February 1972.