Marguerite Klein

Origins and early life

Marguerite Klein was born in the tenth arrondissement of Paris on 28 June 1914, in a Jewish and practising family, and died at Strasbourg on 4 February 1979 of cancer.

Work and career

Her father Salomon Klein was a doctor and a pillar of the synagogue Adas Yereim in the rue Cadet in Paris, and she followed him into medicine, working as a school physician in Paris, Mulhouse, Colmar and Strasbourg. In 1941 she married her cousin Samy Klein, a rabbi and a member of the Resistance, and she bore two daughters between 1942 and 1944 while the family was living in hiding under the occupation. She directed a children's home of the Œuvre de secours aux enfants at Versailles, caring for children the war had left without parents.

Her lasting work was in Jewish scouting: she was national commissioner of the Jewish girl guides within the Fédération française des éclaireuses until 1960, and in 1966 she was elected president of the Éclaireuses éclaireurs israélites de France, the movement formed by the merger of 1964, an office she held until 1973. She belonged to the generation that had to rebuild, for children who had lost everything, an ordinary Jewish childhood of camps, songs and troops.