The Shoah Memorial pays tribute to Hubert Heilbronn (1931-2024), its former vice-president and administrator.
Hubert Heilbronn has accompanied and supported the development of our Institution for many years.
He was Commander of the Legion of Honor and Commander of Arts and Letters.
The Shoah Memorial extends its condolences to his family and loved ones.
Tribute to Hubert Heilbronn
Former Vice President of the Holocaust Memorial, 1985-2008,
by his son François Heilbronn
Montparnasse Cemetery, April 17, 2024
Dear family, friends and friends of Hubert Heilbronn
Thank you for coming so many on this day to accompany our dear father, Hubert Heilbronn.
We are here with him, he is with us, for one last time.
This tricolour flag, so dear and so cherished by him and by our whole family, envelops it. The flag of France, the French Republic, her France and France of the patriots of her family who fought for her, and for so many of them to the supreme sacrifice.
On his coffin is engraved a star of David, on the flag are laid his two decorations and among the most illustrious, that of commander of the Legion of Honor whose motto suits him so well, Honor and Homeland. And that of Commander of Arts and Letters for him the eternal lover of Books.
Honor and Fatherland, decorated with the Legion of Honor as his father Jacques Heilbronn, him at 18 years old as a military for heroic acts in 1918, his grandfather Henri Klotz Artillery captain in Verdun, and Officer of the Legion of Honor as a military, his great-grandfathers Victor Klotz and Julien Hayem both officers of the Legion of Honor and valiant national guards during the siege of Paris in 1870. From his great-great-grandfather Simon Hayem, also an officer in this order.
And our father, so attached to this Honor and to our homeland, was filled when in the sixth generation and thus without interruption, my sister Anne, the first wife of our family for 150 years and I were in turn named knights of the Legion of Honor.
So many heroes in his family. Two of his great uncles died in France in 1914 and 1915, Captain Émile Hayem and Lieutenant Henri Hayem. Other heroes, whom he loved and knew, fell in battle between 40 and 44, his uncle Lieutenant Pierre Heilbronn in June 40, his other uncle Lieutenant parachutist François Klotz in June 44, and his cousin Hubert de la Fressange in October 1944.
He still admired his older brother Didier Heilbronn who at 17 joined Algeria and the Parachute Shock Battalion, was wounded and decorated in the battles of the Vosges and Germany at 18.
Papa served for three years as Marshal of the Logis on the 2nd and 3rd Hussars, and the books crowded the turret of his tank in winter 55 in the Atlas Mountains.
He now joins his heroic deaths who carried so high «France by falling».
There is also his fidelity to his Jewish identity, to his inseparable Jewish and republican values. It belongs to these Jewish families that we called French Israelites and that my grandfather always full of humor as my father nicknamed PIF … of the French Israelite Patriots.
On the paternal side Heilbronn was a family from Fürth in Bavaria whose ancestor Jules chose France in 1852, land of freedom and hope. On the maternal side, his mother Anne-Marie Klotz came from the Klotzes of an Alsatian Jewish family of Wissembourg and his mother Flore Hayem of a Lorraine Jewish family of Metz since the 16th century. These two families settled in Paris between 1810 and 1820. He was proud to say that he had been born in Paris to a Parisian family for at least five generations.
The Hayem descended from the doctor Isaïe Cerf Oulman saviour of King Louis XV and the Spire-Lévy descendants of the first Lévy rabbis of Metz. These descended directly from Mattathias de Trèves grand rabbi of France in the 14th century and finally from the greatest Talmudist and first prose writer in the 11th century in Champagne, the rabbi and winemaker Rachi de Troyes.
This spiritual family of rabbis and great scholars over at least eight centuries, also represented his identity, his heritage and surely his passion for the Books, he the layman, deeply secular and absolutely not practicing except for the fast of Kippur.
Then he met Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur more than twelve years ago at the Bar Mitsvot of his grandchildren David, Max and Salomé. She brought him up to the Teva to bless them, and where for the first time as this day, his Hebrew names were pronounced, Israel ben Yaakov, Israel son of Jacob.
With Delphine, he found in her, beyond her intellectual, spiritual qualities and their shared love of Jewish jokes, the strength of Lorraine Judaism steeped in love with France, the Book and all books. I thank her for her words today. He specifically asked me that Delphine accompany him, as she had done so well in October 2019 for our mother, right here under this lime tree.
Parisian child of the Republic and public schools, his Jewish identity was secondary, even forgotten. But on October 3, 1940, the French State, all the very high French Administration including the Council of State, wrote to this 9-year-old boy, you are now an outcast, a less than nothing, an outcast of the Nation.
He gradually became an invisible child, going from cache to cache, out of school, hunted, hunted like 70,000 other Jewish children in France. Hunted by the police and the gendarmerie of his country France and the Gestapo.
His head for four years was put at a price.
He will leave Paris in June 40 with his dear grandparents Ernest and Claire Heilbronn. He will go from town to town. He will be hidden in Saint-Martin d’Uriage above Grenoble with his mother Anne-Marie, his younger sister Florence, who died in 2018, and his cousin Philippe Heilbronn whom we buried a few meters from here six months ago. During this time his father led a resistance network in Seine-et-Marne in his farm of Suscy in the village of Crisenoy near the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte.
My father, a February 6, 44 in Uriage, aged twelve, attended the arrest of Ernest and Claire Heilbronn by an Austrian SS commando led by Aloïs Brunner.
It was then the escape organized by my grandmother and the rescue and hiding in Moulins for six months by a couple of cook and sabotier, Marguerite and Jacques Copet, Guiguitte and Jean-Jean, named Righteous among the Nations in 2003.
He returned to Paris in September 1944, aged 13. His three grandparents had been murdered like three aunts and six cousins. Three uncles and cousins fell in battle. Mourning began where France and Paris celebrated their liberation.
Hubert, like all Jewish children who survived the raids, deportation and murder, had resisted. He had survived a criminal and police German state, he had survived a French state that was involved in the killing of foreign and French Jewish children.
And like all hidden Jewish children, this struggle and this survival so young had given him immense strength. Every day of his life was a day won over death. One had to live fully. But it was also necessary to show oneself worthy of one’s own and of all those killed or killed in battle, worthy of their example of courage and dignity.
His Judaism was not religious, far from it, he was spiritual, intellectual but above all made of fights for the dignity of the Jews in France, in Israel and in the whole world as he had taught so well the luminous pages of «Our youth» de Péguy, dedicated to Bernard Lazare. He often quoted this phrase from Péguy about the Jewish people, which he made his own: “I know this people well. There is not a point on the skin that is not painful, where there is an old bruise, an old bruise, a dull pain, a scar, a bruise from the East or the West.”
In 1952, he went to live six months in kibbutz in Israel. This country also became for him a «land of love», for which he will always fight, until his last breath.
His last breath in the arms of his three children, when at the same time the Iranian missile criminals were all shot down over the sky of Israel. He would have been worried and proud. He, who since October 7 and the massive pogrom of Jews in the land of Israel, relived like all the Jews of his generation even more painfully this return of anti-Semitic barbarism to genocidal will. And as in the dark years, as a second wound, this murder of Jews was supported or even acclaimed by many French and even deputies. Since October 7, some buried anxieties were resurfacing. My fights worried him sometimes but also reassured him and as always, he supported me, reread my texts before sending to the press.
His support for Israel was constant, in 1956 serving as Marshal des Logis in the French cavalry, he wanted to join the French paratroopers who were jumping on Suez to fight alongside the Israeli ally. In 1967, with his brother Didier, they volunteered at the Embassy of Israel to defend Israel against five Arab armies. In 1991, when Israel was under fire from Iraqi Scuds potentially loaded with gas, he went there in solidarity with a CRIF delegation. He spent a night in a shelter with a gas mask where he exchanged quotes from Péguy with his friend François Léotard.
In 2002, in the midst of a wave of deadly attacks in Israel, he did not hesitate with my mother and I, like Simone Veil and her son Pierre-François to go for Yom Hashoah to the kibbutz of the Warsaw ghetto fighters. Simone and Pierre-François lit one of six flames representing our six million dead, my father and I another. He finally returned often to Israel to participate in the colloquia of the University of Tel Aviv. University where he gave a series of courses within his department of French worship on “Cinq écrivains français – Pascal, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Péguy, Claudel – dans le mystère et la lumière d’Israël”.
By marrying our mother Gina Escojido, with whom he will now rest and who he missed every day since his disappearance four and a half years ago, he married the Mediterranean sun. Our maternal family was Jewish from the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, driven from their country in 1956, our grandparents, Jaime and Soledad, our uncles and aunts settled in Israel. We met every summer at the Kibbutz of Sdot Yam near Caesarea. Papa came there with happiness and declared Berenice in the ruins of Caesarea with his brother-in-law and friend Claude Sautet, and dedicated these verses to my sister Laurence, whose third name, “I remained wandering for a long time in Caesarea…”.
This love of Israel, the pride of a Jewish Frenchman rooted in his land of France, his generosity, his courage and his philanthropy led him to engage as an active activist in many Jewish associations.
At the request of his President Jules Braunschwig, a close friend of his father, he joined the Universal Israelite Alliance in 1975 until his death. Where he then assisted his friend Professor Ady Steg as his President. Then he agreed to return to the CRIF under the presidency of a man he admired, Alain de Rothschild, and he became treasurer under the presidencies of Alain, but also of Théo Klein and Jean Kahn for almost 20 years. He was still a member of its Steering Committee.
In 1985, encouraged by our mother who raised funds with Mary de Rothschild to save the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in great difficulty that became the Holocaust Memorial, he became its vice-president alongside Eric de Rothschild, whose friendly presence I wish to salute today, as well as that of all the teams of the Memorial and its director Jacques Fredj.
At the Memorial, he was a driving force with Éric de Rothschild, Serge Klarsfeld, Simone Veil, André Wormser, Jacques Fredj and our dearest Pierrot Kauffmann for the extension of the Memorial and the creation of the Wall of Names of Jews deported from France where the names of twelve of his family are engraved, that he has all known and loved. It was he who insisted that the Wall of the Righteous be built among the nations in the same place, he who had been saved by an admirable couple, to whom he will remain as my faithful grandparents all their lives.
Having joined the office of the Memorial at his side in 2000, he wished as Éric that I become the vice-president in his place in 2008.
It was in 2014 that he wanted to create a Foundation housed at the Shoah Memorial named after his beloved grandparents, Ernest and Claire Heilbronn murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to fund and reward doctoral students working on the history of Jews in France, professors committed against racism and anti-Semitism and confirmed historians, and take precedence over a reference book on Jews in France published in the year.
He presided this Foundation until the end and on March 12, a month ago, for the 80 years of the deportation of Ernest, Claire and Marcelle his aunt, he presided over the award ceremony at the Memorial and read the letter that Ernest Heilbronn had sent to the prefect of Isère on 12 July 1941, where he wrote:
“Mr. Prefect,
To obey the law of June 2, I have the honour to make the following statement.
My name is Ernest, Georges Heilbronn. I am an Israelite, born in Paris on October 13, 1867. I am French, my parents were French.
My wife, born Claire Marie Goldschmidt who lives with me, was born in Paris on July 25, 1872, her parents were French. Our usual home is in Paris.
We are temporarily staying at the Hotel Moderne.
Lives with us generally our grandson Philippe Pierre Heilbronn, born in Paris on July 25, 1932, whose father, our son Pierre Heilbronn, officer in the 2nd motorized free cavalry group was killed to the enemy on June 9, 1940…”
Another of his deep commitments was the Judeo-Christian Friendship of which he created the Prize in 1990, which since this year bears his name, the Hubert Heilbronn Prize of Judeo-Christian FriendshipThis prize was a way of honouring his aunt Marcelle Chevalier née Heilbronn, a heroic nurse of the two wars, converted to Catholicism, who chooses to voluntarily follow his parents in deportation so as not to abandon them. In this remarkable institution he made deep friendships with Chief Rabbi Sirat and Cardinals Lustiger and Decourtray. He fought with them to the end so that the sacrilegious Carmel of Auschwitz would be removed.
Here is the life of a Jew in the city, a committed Jew, a fierce republican of a hidden Jewish child who, through the fight for justice, has shown himself worthy of all his ascendants, patriots, philanthropists, lovers of justice, enlightened and in love with the Republic and France.
