Simon Levitte

Origins and early life

Simon Levitte was born at Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro in Ukraine, on 16 November 1912, a French Jewish educator of Russian origin, and died at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in April 1968.

Work and career

In May 1942 he founded, with Dika Jefroykin, the Mouvement de jeunesse sioniste, the Zionist youth movement that became one of the matrices of Jewish resistance in the southern zone: from it came forgery workshops that produced false papers by the thousand, the escape lines to Switzerland and Spain, and the convoys of hidden children. He organised at Moissac a training course for the young leaders who would run that work, on the reasoning that what was needed was not volunteers but people who had been taught.

He also directed the transfers of the Éclaireurs israélites de France and prepared Jewish young people for Palestine. After the war, in 1949, he created houses to prepare young French Jews for aliyah. His brother Georges Lévitte, whose parents and younger brother were deported by convoy 47, became one of the architects of French Jewish intellectual life; his nephew Jean-David Levitte became a French ambassador and diplomatic adviser to the president of the Republic.