Lucien-de-de-de-hirsch (wikipedia

L’ Lucien-de-Hirsch school is the oldest Jewish school in France. It was founded in Paris in 1901, and today welcomed 1,200 students from kindergarten to the final year.

The beginnings (1901-1939) [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

In 1864, a Jewish school was opened in the Villette district of Paris. It is thus the oldest ^{[ first ]} Jewish school in France still in office ^{[ 2 ]} . Management is entrusted at the time to Mr. and M ^me Halphen.

Due to the increase in its workforce, due to the arrival of young Alsatians-Lorraine people who came in large numbers in Paris after the war of 1870, the school was transferred to Boulevard de la Villette, then to Boulevard de la Chapelle and Finally rue La Fayette. But the new premises are quickly too small, the number of students increasing due to the emigration of Jews from Russia who fled the persecution of their country.

Postcard showing the old rue Secretan (between 1880 and 1911).

Faced with the difficulties in which the Halphen school is struggling, the Baroness Clara de Hirsch decides to have a new school, which settled in avenue Secretan, in 1901, built a new school, in 1901 ^{[ 3 ]} . She entrusts the construction to the architect Lucien Hesse and gives him the name of “Lucien-de-Hirsch” to perpetuate the memory of his son who is prematurely disappeared. The goal of the school is to allow Jewish children to adapt quickly to the culture and language of their new country.

The school is open under the direction of Mr. and M ^me Benoit-Lévy who occupied this position until 1935, the date on which the school management was jointly assured by Mr. Schentowski and Mr. Charles Bloch. The school is designed to house a hundred children and nothing is spared to make it a spacious and modern establishment; The central building is reserved for the canteen, the drawing rooms and the library, the two symmetrical wings constitute the school of boys and the school of girls. Without discontinuity, generations of young Jews followed one another until 1944. General orientation aims to integrate the French society of Jews from various backgrounds.

World War II and Holocaust [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

During the Second World War, in 1940, feeling the danger to arrive, Mr. Schentowski temporarily transfers children in Normandy.

In April 1944, the Lamarck Center having been bombed, the building became a reception center of the General Union of Israelites of France (UGIF) for orphaned children ^{[ 4 ]} . These are young residents of the center as well as their monitors (125 children and 52 adults) who are transferred to the Lucien-de-Hirsch school ^{[ 5 ]} ?

A few days before the release of Paris, 110 of them and their masters were arrested on the night of July 24, 1944 by the Nazi officer Aloïs Brunner, and deported the July 31, 1944 Towards Auschwitz-Birkenau by convoy n ° 77, the last convoy from Paris ^{[ 6 ] , [ 7 ] , [ 8 ] , [ 9 ] , [ 5 ]} .

Only a few children will come back ^{[ ten ]} . Mr. Schentowski, to whom he is proposed to have his life saved because of his feats of arms during the First World War, made the decision to follow the children ^{[Ref. necessary]} .

A commemorative granite plaque was affixed on March 28, 1954 on the facade of the building, entitled “Remember” gives the list of children and adults deported to this school ^{[ 9 ] , [ 11 ]} .

After war [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

At the Liberation, the buildings were occupied by a social service which in 1949 rendered the premises of the avenue Secretan for their primary destination. On this date, the resistant and educator Théo Dreyfus takes care of the school. A long and expensive work must be done to restore everything that has been ransacked. After a month, the Lucien-de-Hirsch school is able to receive a dozen students and the following year, with the new director Bernard Picard who will run the school for 15 years, 90 students. The experience of war and the lessons that these young directors draw them to change the orientation of the school. Their goal is to develop in their young students the love of authentic Judaism, of the Jewish people, and the meaning of their history.

Since that time, the school has seen its workforce each year increase both at the external and in boarding school which is opened mainly to host children victims of the Nazi persecution then the refugee children of Poland, Egypt and Africa North.

In 1955, Baron Alain de Rothschild, chairman of the board of directors, built new buildings reserved for boarding school, including comfortable dormitories and two vast refectories. The boarding school has up to 115 residents in 1962, the year of the influx of the Jews of Algeria.

The number of registration requests is more important each year and at each return, hundreds of inscriptions are refused. Measures are then taken to allow the schooling of new students. Many former students enroll their own children in school. For practical reasons many families come to settle near the establishment, making 19 ^{It is} Paris district a new district with high Jewish density. At the same time, the traditional Jewish districts of Paris, such as the 9 ^{It is} And ten ^{It is} districts, and especially the marsh (the Pletzel ), see their Jewish population decline.

A first Ashkénaze synagogue is created in the very buildings of the school (Michkenot Israel synagogue), followed a few years later, in other rooms in the building, of a Sephardic oratory (Ohale Yaakov). Today, given the importance of these two communities, they left school to occupy much larger buildings nearby.

In 1976, the living conditions of refugees having gradually improved, the boarding school is no longer essential and is therefore closed. In 1977, thanks to the financial participation of the Fipe (Investment Fund for Education), created by the Unified Jewish Social Fund and the Jewish Agency, work allowed the opening of new classrooms, of dormitories for Children’s gardens, and give school the possibility of welcoming 830 students. In 1991 an elevation of the central building on three new floors made it possible to further improve working and reception conditions.

Under the supervision of Marianne Picard, the school will have the first to acquire a constructed program of teaching religious materials, training for teachers of Jewish matters, and a systematic teaching of Jewish history than It will ensure itself, and which will give rise to publication in the form of a manual in three volumes ^{[ twelfth ]} . Strongly influenced by fashionable methods in Israel, she will introduce innovative pedagogies, regularly associating parents of students at the end of year celebrations or the end of study of a chapter of the Thora, and creating a competition internal biblical. Inspired by active methods, Marianne Picard is also writing and broadcasting by the students of a school newspaper, The chained deer (Allusion at the end Hirsch which means “deer”).

At the dawn of September 26, 1980, four anti-Semitic attacks took place in Paris: the Jewish crèche rue Lamarck, the Synagogue on rue de la Victoire, the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr and, finally, the Lucien- de-Hirsch, without a victim to deplore ^{[ 13 ]} .

In the 1980s, the school saw an association of parents of students: APELH.

In 1995, a division of 4 ^{It is} , followed each year with a new class opening and a duplication of existing college classes. This, until June 2000 where the school presents its first students in the baccalaureate.

Since then, a gymnasium and a new building specifically dedicated to high school have been inaugurated.

In 2018, the school ranks 43 ^{It is} out of 108 at the departmental level in terms of education quality, and 200 ^{It is} out of 2,277 at the national level ^{[ 14 ]} .

The classification is established on three criteria: the success rate in the baccalaureate (100%), the proportion of first students who obtained the baccalaureate by having made the last two years of their schooling in the establishment (91%), and “added value” (6) calculated from the social origin of students, their age and their results to the national patent diploma ^{[ 15 ]} .

• Raphaël Elmaleh, A history of modern Jewish education in France: the Lucien school in Hirsch, Paris, Biblierope, 2006
• Janine Mivinginger, Bernard Picard: the gift of a presence , Biblioeurope, 2000 ^{[ 20 ]} .
• Michael Blum, Bernard and Marianne Picard: the fight for Jewish education , preface to the Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim.
• Marianne Picard, Jews and Judaism , (ed. Biblierope), 3 volumes.
• Dominique Jarassé, Parisian Jewish heritage guide , Parigramme, 2003.