Schneour Zalman SchneersonThe name is also spelled Schneerson (Nathan, 2008), and according to the daughter of the rabbi, Hadassa Carlebach (ibid.) he was called Chneerson during World War II.Zuccotti (1993, p. 341, note 14) gives another version of the name. She writes: "The AIP was founded in Paris in 1936 by Grand Rabbi Zalman Chneersohn". (1898–1980) was a Lubavitch Hasidic Chief Rabbi who was active in France during World War II. During the Nazi occupation of France, he ran homes for children who had been separated from their families, providing them with food, shelter, and a Jewish education. Later, as the situation in France worsened, he smuggled many of them to safety.

Biography Schneour Zalman Schneersohn was born in Gomel, Russian Empire (currently in Belarus) in 1898.Le rav Schneor Zalman Schneerson en France (1936-19470 (extrait) , un article de Kountrass Online, Iyar 5763 / Mai 2003. He belonged to the Lubavitch hassidic dynasty.

Schneersohn was descended on both sides from prestigious Hasidic families. He was the son of Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, grandson of Levi Yitzchak Schneersohn, great grandson of Baruch Shalom Schneersohn, the oldest son of the Tzemach Tzedek (Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the third Rebbe of the Lubavitch dynasty). His mother, Liba Leah, was the granddaughter of Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, one of the main disciples of Dov Ber of Mezeritch, himself one of the main disciples and successor of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism.genealogical inscriptions on his tomb (Kevarim of Tzadikim in North America. Photo of the tomb of Schneour Zalman Schneersohn, with its biographical data. ), The Tsemah Tzedek Family Tree. His daughter, Hadassah, married Eli Chaim Carlebach in 1949.

Schneersohn was active in the Jewish religious resistance in the USSR, distributing funds and prayer books with the help of the Political Red Cross. In 1935, after receiving his semikhah from the Lubavitch yeshiva in Russia, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine but after a few months, left for France on his way to the United States. In the end, he remained in France.

In 1936, he created the Association des Israélites Pratiquants (AIP) (also Kehillat Haharedim), an association of Orthodox Jews promoting religious and educational activities throughout France.Lazare, 1987, p. 139. The organization "provided material relief to needy Jewish refugees...founded Hebrew schools and synagogues, set up kosher soup kitchens and distributed clothing and money."holocaustchild.org

Léon Poliakov, a French historian close with Rabbi Schneersohn, claims that "his orthodoxy, of an absolute intransigence, or his working methods, as flexible as they were, were disconcerting, not to mention his manners and his dress which did not appeal to his French colleagues." He thus focused his attention on teaching children, opening eight Talmud Torah schools attended by several hundreds of children.

Jewish children's homes When the Nazis invaded France in May 1940, Schneersohn was forced to leave Paris. Wherever he went, he relocated the AIP with him. From February 1940 to March 1944, he opened a series of homes for children in cooperation with the AIP and the OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants). The first was established in Chateau des Morelles in Brout-Vernet.

In 1941, he traveled to Marseilles. In the wooded and hilly east of the city, he rented la Maison de Beaupin as a home for children whose parents had been arrested. After the arrest of several children in Marseilles on 12 August 1942, he moved the children to a property in Dému, in the southwest of France.

In 1943, when the Germans expanded their territory in France., Schneersohn moved the children to Voiron, near Saint-Etienne-de-Crosse, in the Italian-occupied zone of l'Isere.

On 6 September 1943, the children were taken to Nice in the belief it would be safer since the Italians had changed sides to the Allies. But the Germans were waiting and on 10 September, invaded, rounding up and deporting 6,000 people. The children were smuggled back to Isère. Two members of the party were caught and the rabbi and his family were forced into hiding.

That winter, the children who remained were hidden in five locations in the area. On the l night of 22 March, one of these locations, La Martelliere, was raided. Sixteen boys and one woman, the mother of two brothers in the group, were arrested and deported. Only one of the boys survived the war. The same afternoon, Sara Schneerson, the rabbi's wife, was arrested in La Manche, close to Voiron, where the rabbi and some of his students had found a hiding place. She was taken to the French Millice headquarters, interrogated and tortured, but she maintained that the rabbi had escaped to Switzerland, not giving away his true hiding place. After her release, she walked around for miles instead of going straight to her husband's hideaway in order to mislead her torturers. Her ploy worked and the hiding place was not discovered.

As Chana Arnon-Benninga describes, "From then on, until the liberation of Grenoble, on 22 August 1944, the children, the rabbi, his wife and the young adults, were hidden at different places in the Voiron area, some not seeing the light of day for weeks on end. At liberation, the Schneerson family returned to Paris, taking some of the survivors with them; others went back to La Manoir to take care of some of the orphans helped by students who wanted to stay on. In September 1946, the youth home closed its doors definitely, the last members relocating to Boissy-Saint-Leger, in the Paris area."

Much of what is known about Rabbi Schneersohn is thanks to the historian Léon Poliakov, who was the rabbi's personal secretary, and became secretary of the AIP in 1943.According to Lazare, 1987, p. 357, note 38, Poliakov was secretary of the AIP from November 1941 to August 1942.Lazare, ibid., underlines that "A voluminous collection of archives of the AIP was entrusted by Z. Chneerson to YIVO – collection 340."According to Poznansky, 1994, p. 203 : "All the Jewish organizations employed Jews who, before the war, hardly knew the existence of Jewish institutions. The most surprising example is may be the one of Léon Poliakov, an agnostic if there was one, who ended up, overnight, secretary of the Association des Israélites Pratiquants – an ultra-orthodox organization – headed at Marseille by the rabbi Zalman Chneerson." Poliakov would tell in 1997 that he became acquainted with of Chief Rabbi Schneersohn when he was looking for a rabbi to officiate at his father's funeral. Later, on the Canebière in Marseille, he met Chief Rabbi Schneersohn who offers him the position of secretary. Their collaboration lasted several months until Poliakov gave up following ideological differences – he opposed the idea to contact Joseph GoebbelsChief Rabbi Schneersohn doesn't grasp then that the separation of the Jews from the remainder of the population advocated by the Nazis is in fact the prelude to their extermination, the "Final Solution". He had known the communist regime and its limitations to the practice of religion. Mankind had not known yet a systematic genocide, country after country, this "Final Solution". – and religious differences. Poliakov later went on to found, together with Rabbi Schneersohn's cousin, Isaac Schneersohn, the Shoah Memorial, Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation.

Timeline of locations February 1940 – January 1941: Château des Morelles, Brout-Vernet (Allier). April 1942: Villa Beaupin, in the Vieille Chapelle district of Marseilles November 1942: Domaine de Seignebon, at Dému (Gers). 1942–1944: successively : Grenoble. Château du Manoir, hameau de L'Étang-Dauphin, Saint-Étienne-de-Crossey (Isère),Lazare, 1987, p. 227, writes: "There is on the other hand the refusal by Schneerson of the AIP to scatter individually, under cover of a full "aryanisation", the wards of the home of Saint-Étienne-de-Crossey." Note in passing, that in the index of his book (p.419), Lazare mixes up the names of the two cousins: Isaac Schneersohn and Schneour Zalman Schneersohn. Beginning in March 1943. pension Cavalier and Hôtel Rivoli, at Nice. 1943 (...-October 1943). Château du Manoir (return) from October 1943 to December 1943, then dispersal of the children in three hamlets close to Voiron (Isère): La Manche, hameau de Saint-Jean-de-Moirans (Isère), in December 1943. La Martellière, Voiron (Isère), also in December 1943. 16 children, aged 7 to 21, and two adults are arrested there by the milice during the night of 23 March to March 1944, following a denunciation. The children are deported in the Convoi 71This Convoi 71 includes Simone Jacob, aged 16 ans, who will be known later as Simone Veil. Serge Klarsfeld, 1978. of 13 April 1944"rafle de seize enfants juifs", L'Humanité, 23 August 1997 and the Convoi n° 73 of 15 May 1944.See,Eve Line Blum-Cherchevsky. Convoi 73. Abraham Rosenzweig. Zuccotti, 1993, p. 193, talks about 18 children; in reality, there are 16 children and two adults—cf. "La ville de Voiron découvre la rafle de seize enfants juifs" , L'Humanité, 23 August 1997 hameau de Chirens (Isère) and Saint-Étienne-de-Crossey (a room), starting in October 1943.

Descriptions of Schneersohn