Marianne Picard

Origins and early life

Marianne Picard, born Marianne Schwab in 1929 and dead in 2006, was a French Jewish educator and the wife of Bernard Picard, with whom she shared a single vocation for the whole of their lives.

Work and career

She worked beside him at the École Lucien-de-Hirsch in Paris while he directed it, and she succeeded him at the head of that school when he moved in 1965 to the École Yabné. The Lucien-de-Hirsch, in the rue Claude-Bernard, was one of the two great Jewish schools of Paris in the decades after the war, and its direction meant carrying both a general curriculum and the teaching of Hebrew, the Bible and the Jewish calendar for children whose families had often been broken by the deportations.

Her work is inseparable from her husband's, and the sources record the two names together as one educational undertaking of the French Jewish community. She left for Israel with him in 1992, when he retired from the École Yabné. She died there in 2006, eight years after him, and she belongs among the women who rebuilt Jewish education in France without ever writing a book about it.