Mathieu Muller

Origins and early life

Mathieu Muller was born at Diemeringen, in an Alsace then held by the German Empire, on 13 August 1895, in an observant family, and died in Jerusalem on 8 July 1979; the sources call him a community figure of French Judaism.

Work and career

He was president of the French branch of Agoudat Israel, the movement of Orthodox Jewry founded in 1912, and sat on the board of the synagogue Adas Yereim. He was a lawyer, and his name became known through a defamation case he won against Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist whose paper Der Stürmer carried the crudest antisemitic caricature of the age. He left Paris in the first months of the war and reached Switzerland over the Pyrenees in November 1942.

He gathered some five thousand Jewish ritual objects and had them sent to the Jews interned in the French camps of Gurs and Les Milles, so that men held behind barbed wire could still pray with what the law of their fathers required. He worked with the diplomat George Mantello to produce certificates of Salvadoran citizenship, papers that placed their holders under the protection of a neutral state and saved lives that would otherwise have gone to the trains. In 1954 he founded with Edmond Weill the Merkaz of Montmartre, a cultural, educational and leisure association.