Finaly affair

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The Finaly Affair (Affaire Finaly) was a dispute over the custody of two Holocaust orphans between 1945 and 1953 in France . The brothers Robert Finaly (born April 14, 1941) and Gérald Finaly (born July 3, 1942) were awarded by the Grenoble court in 1950 to their aunt, who lived in Israel .

The affair divided public opinion in France between the clericals and the anti-clericals , the philosemites and the anti-Semites , the advocates of the republican rule of law and those of universal canon law . A French minister, Pope Pius XII, was involved in the affair . and two later popes, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (John XXIII.) and Giovanni Montini (Paul VI.), helped establish and tried to push through Catholic interests. The affair reminded French Jews of the experiences of the Dreyfus affair and adversely affected the Judeo-Christian dialogue in France .

Finaly family

The Austrian physician Fritz Finaly (1906-1944) was still on 21 July 1938, after the annexation of Austria in March, subject to certain conditions at the University of Vienna graduated and received with the "non-Aryans Promotion" at the same time a professional ban for the German Reich . He married Anni Schwarz (1915–1944) in Vienna on August 30, 1938 and first emigrated to Czechoslovakia and, after it was broken up, to Paris . A further journey to Bolivia did not succeed, and so Finaly was interned as an enemy foreigner when the Second World War broke out . One of Finaly's sister emigrated to Palestine , two others to New Zealand .

After the German conquest of France and the occupation of northern France , the Finalys lived in La Tronche near Grenoble in Vichy France , where Finaly practiced illegally without a license. The sons born there were circumcised by the father and were to grow up in the Mosaic faith . The Finaly couple were arrested on February 14, 1944 and deported on March 7 with transport no. 69 from the Drancy assembly camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where they were murdered in the gas chamber . An official declaration of death was made in France in 1950.

The three-year-old Gérald and the two-year-old Robert Finaly were housed in 1944 by a neighbor and confidante of their parents in the monastery of the Sions of Sion in Grenoble. The order was founded in 1842 by two Jewish converts and has the special task of educating and caring for Jews who have converted to the Christian faith. From there the two came to the municipal children's home. Its head, Antoinette Brun, had already taken in ten other Jewish children and, when a Gestapo search threatened, hid the group in a house near Vif , where they saw France's liberation at the end of 1944.

process

The kindergarten teacher Brun was unwilling to let the two boys, who were now living in the municipal crèche and in Catholic boarding schools, return to their Jewish (extended) family when Margarethe Fischel, Finaly's sister, came from New Zealand and later in February 1945 , 1948, Aunt Yehudith Rosner from Israel reported to the Œuvre de secours aux enfants and the local government in Grenoble. In the following years, with the support of church institutions, Brun let the activities of his relatives come to nothing. Brun had the two boys baptized Catholics in 1948 ; she had the support of the nuns. From then on it was also a fundamental question for the Catholic Church to leave two Christians to the Jews. The Apostolic Nuncio in France Angelo Roncalli had already ordered in October 1946 that Jewish children admitted during the war should not be released from the care of the Church, referring to Pope Pius XII. called.

Only through the personal commitment of the Grenoble chemical entrepreneur Moshe Keller and the Grenoble lawyer Wladimir Rabinovitch was it finally possible, after several legal failures, to obtain a court order in 1950 that ordered the children to be handed over to their aunt in Israel. For the institutions of the French Catholic Church, however, bringing up children baptized Catholics in a Jewish family was out of the question. To prevent the publication, Brun and the Abbess Antoine conferred in 1952 with Bishop Pierre-Marie Gerlier and the (Catholic) Minister of Commerce, Guy Petit . The children were hidden by church members in Marseilles and then smuggled through the Basque border region into Francoist Spain . On January 8, 1953, Brun and mother Antoine confessed to the judge of the Cour d'Appel de Grenoble about the child abduction, but did not reveal their whereabouts in Spain. Brun and Antoine were briefly arrested but not convicted.

In the public affair, the Nobel Prize winner for literature and Catholic Francois Mauriac took up a position at Figaro for the kindergarten teacher Brun. For the political left, Paul Bénichou pointed out in Le Monde the violation of the French principle of the separation of church and state . On the part of Pope Pius XII. the State Secretary Substitute Giovanni Montini was dealing with the matter. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault used a state visit to Italy to discuss the problem in the Vatican . In return for cooperation in finding the children, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco asked France to expel Republican Spaniards from France, which Bidault rejected. In the National Assembly , the affair was raised as a major question . On the street, catholic clergy were molested by passers-by and asked about the whereabouts of the Finaly boys.

The pressure of public opinion prompted the Catholic Church of France finally negotiations with the Grand Rabbi of France Jacob Kaplan , who had himself published several appeals. Germaine Ribière and Pierre Chaillet , who had both saved Jews during the German occupation, were also involved in the action .

With the help of lawyer Maurice Garçon , another court order was obtained in Grenoble on June 23, 1953, and the children reappeared on June 25 at the French consulate in San Sebastian . The children arrived in Israel in July 1953. Her integration into a new family environment and a new language proved difficult and was accompanied by the psychologists Kalman Benyamini and Reuven Feuerstein . Robert Finaly later became a doctor at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba and Gerald Finaly was a soldier in the Israeli army and an employee of the Bezeq telephone company in Haifa . They both have families.

reception

Several monographs have been published on the affair. In 2007 David Korn-Brzoza produced the one-hour documentary L'Affaire Finaly with the journalist Noël Mamère for France 3 with interviews with the brothers. The television film Une enfance volée - l'affaire Finaly was shown for the first time in 2008 on France 2 and has since been broadcast repeatedly. In the film, Charlotte de Turckheim plays Madame Brun and Pierre Cassignard plays Moïse Keller. The director Fabrice Genestal was assisted by the historian Catherine Poujol.

literature

  • Vladimir Rabinovitch : L'affaire Finaly. Des faits. Of the text. Of the date . éditions Transhumances, Paris 2009.
  • Joyce Block Lazarus: In the Shadow of Vichy: The Finaly Affair . With a Foreword by Robert Finaly (Studies in Modern European History). Peter Lang, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4331-0212-7 .
  • Catherine Poujol, Chantal Thoinet: Les enfants cachés: l'affaire Finaly (1945–1953) . éditions Berg International, 2006, ISBN 978-2-911289-86-6 .
  • Fabien Lacaf, Catherine Poujol: Les enfants cachés, l'affaire Finaly . Berg International, 2007, ISBN 978-2-911289-93-4 .
  • Germain Latour: Les deux orphelins: l'affaire Finaly, 1945–1953 . Fayard, Paris 2006.
  • Madeleine Comte: Sauvetages et baptêmes, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame de Sion face à la persécution des Juifs en France (1940–1944) . Foreword by Étienne Fouilloux . L'Harmattan, 2001, ISBN 2-7475-1190-1 .
  • Jacob Kaplan: L'affaire Finaly . Éditions du Cerf, 1993.
  • Lemma Finaly Case , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1973, Volume 6, Sp. 1279-1280.
  • Moïse Keller: L'affaire Finaly telle que je l'ai vécue . Fischbacher, Paris 1960.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Finaly , at DNB
  2. ^ Gérald Finaly , at DNB
  3. ↑ a b c d Michael Rosner: A Personal Look at the Finaly Children Affair - a Tragic Holocaust Byproduct with a Fortunate Ending, in: Holocaust Survivors' Network, March 2005
  4. ↑ Katharina Kniefacz, Herbert Posch: Fritz Finaly. In: University of Vienna (Ed.): Memorial book for the victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938. ( online , accessed on August 3, 2015)
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g kidnapping. For the health of their souls . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1953 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Jacques Amalric: En toute mauvaise foi, in: Liberation , February 17, 2005. According to his own account, his report is based on Moïse Keller: L'affaire Finaly , 1960.
  7. ↑ Une enfance volée - l'affaire Finaly, from Veronique Chemla, May 30, 2013