Reuben Grinberg

Origins and early life

Reuben Grinberg was born at Proskurov in Ukraine, today Khmelnytskyi, on 12 September 1888 and died at Geneva on 4 April 1970, at the age of eighty-one; the sources call him a French Jewish member of the Resistance.

Work and career

He came to Paris about 1907 to study mathematics and worked at the Banque juive, then gave his life to the institutions of immigrant Jewry in France. He directed ORT France, the organisation founded in Russia in 1880 to teach Jews trades and crafts, and was an active member of the Fédération des sociétés juives de France, the federation of the immigrants' mutual aid societies. Under the occupation he worked in the Amelot committee, the clandestine relief organisation of the rue Amelot in Paris, which fed families, hid children and forged the papers that kept them out of the hands of the police.

He moved his family from Paris to Marseille and then to Voiron during the great roundups, so as to keep working while out of reach. After the war he became president of the Federation. He retired first to Israel and then to Geneva, where he died.