Yonathan Arfi

Origins and early life

Yonathan Arfi was born in Toulouse on 14 April 1980 and raised in a traditional Sephardic Jewish family from Algeria and Morocco, spending his childhood and adolescence in the Yvelines, where he went to state schools and joined the Jewish scouts, the Éclaireurs israélites de France.

Work and career

His great-uncle Alfred Nakache, the Olympic swimmer who survived the Holocaust and was known as the swimmer of Auschwitz, was a guiding figure of the family and shaped his own outlook. He graduated from the HEC business school and runs a group of companies active in business consulting and real estate. From 2003 to 2005 he was president of the Union of French Jewish Students, where he created CoExist, a programme against racist and antisemitic prejudice in schools, and in 2007 he joined the executive board of the CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions.

He became one of its vice-presidents in 2014, and on 26 June 2022 its general assembly elected him president in the first round, by 149 votes to 74, making him at forty-two the first president of the council in his forties. He succeeded Francis Kalifat at the head of a body that brings together some seventy associations of the largest Jewish community in Europe, about 500,000 people, and was re-elected for a second three-year term in June 2025.

In 2023 the Jerusalem Post named him among its five Jewish Community Guardians, at number 47 on its list of the fifty most influential Jews, for the voice he gives French Jewry in the media and with the government.