The Synagogue Agoudas Hakehilos, an Art Noveau synagogue on rue de Pavée designed by Hector Guimard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Patrick Comerford
After Israel and the US, the world’s third-largest Jewish population is in France. I spent an afternoon this weekend in the Marais, which has been the centre of Jewish life in Paris since the 13th century. There I experienced at first-hand the beauty and the resilience of the Jewish community in Paris.
I visited the Holocaust Memorial, the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr and the Museum of Jewish Art and History, and I strolled through the Rue des Rosiers, known affectionately in Yiddish as Pletzl or the ‘Little Place,’ and the surrounding streets, including Rue Pavée.
The Rue des Rosiers is the main street in the Jewish district in Le Marais, and the neighbouring streets are home to many Jewish restaurants, cafés, bakeries and bookshops.
Jews have lived in the area around the Rue des Rosiers since the Middle Ages, until Charles VI expelled them from France in 1394. But 400 years later, after the French Revolution, Jews returned in large numbers to the same street. Many historians believe this suggests Jewish families had continued living in the area in secret in the intervening centuries, explaining why so many Jews moved into the Marais when the edict was revoked.
Rue des Rosiers and Rue Pavée are at the heart of Jewish life in the Marais in Paris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Rue Pavée runs at a corner to Rue des Rosiers. Major rebuilding projects, hoarding and fencing make Rue Pavée an eyesore at present, and it is difficult to see the façades of many buildings on the street.
A surprising building on Rue Pavée is the Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue or Pavée Synagogue at No 10. It was designed in 1913-1914 by Hector Guimard, then the leading exponent of Art Nouveau and the architect who also designed the beautiful Métro entrances throughout Paris.
The story of this synagogue is part of the story of the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived in Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue was built for the Union of the Communities, a society formed by nine communities of Orthodox Jews mainly from Hungary, Russia, Poland and Romania, and headed by Joseph Landau. It is also known as the Guimard Synagogue because of the architect, who had married Landau’s niece.
Almost half the building costs were financed by Landau from his private wealth, and the rest of the costs were met a wealthy group among these immigrés, meaning the Jewish community in Paris never had to contribute towards its building. The plan was to provide a spacious and modernised place for Jews used to more intimate synagogues and places of worship in Poland.
The Rue Pavée Synagogue, built as the Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue, is the only religious building designed by Hector Guimard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Building began in 1913, services were held from October 1913, and it was completed the following year, with its official inauguration on 7 June 1914, a few weeks before the outbreak of World War I. The opening ceremony was not attended by any representants of the Central Consistory, formed in 1905 as an umbrella organisation for Jewish communities after the consistories set up in the Napoleonic era lost their status in public law.
The Central Consistory elects the Chief Rabbi of France, and at the time, Alfred Lévy (1840-1919) was the Chief Rabbi of France.
Instead the famous Polish hazzan Gershon Sirota (1874-1943) was present at the opening. He was one of the leading cantors in Europe during the ‘Golden Age’ of hazzanut or cantorial music, and was known as the ‘Jewish Caruso.’ He later died in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
From 1914, the first Grand Rabbi was Rabbi Joël Leib Halevi Herzog (1865-1934). His son, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog (1889-1959), was a rabbi in Belfast (1916-1919), the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland (1919-1936), and then Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine (1937-1948) and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel (1948); his grandson Chaim Herzog (1918-1997) was President of Israel (1983-1993); and his great-grandson Isaac Herzog has been President of Israel since 2021.
The community at the Pavée Synagogue has its own Chief Rabbi … the first was the father of Ireland’s first chief rabbi (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
A gas explosion in the synagogue in 1934 destroyed the main hall, but it was rebuilt immediately.
The synagogue was dynamited along by collaborators with the Nazis dynamited the Pavée Synagogue and six other Parisian synagogues on the evening of Yom Kippur, 30 September 1941. However, the bomb in the Pavée Synagogue did not go off and the building was preserved. Then, on the night of 2 and 3 October 1941, it was damaged in an attack organised by far-right Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire. It was partially restored after World War II, but the appearance of the main entrance was altered.
The adjacent building at 8 rue Pavée was bought in 1954, providing a house for the rabbi and a courtyard. The building was officially listed as a monument historique on 4 July 1989.
The synagogue has daily, Shabbat and holiday services. It remains outside the structures of the Central Consistory, grouping the majority of orthodox communities in France, and has its own chief rabbi, beth din, yeshiva, boys and girls schools, mikvah and welfare fund.
The present rabbi is Rabbi Moredechai Rottenberg, son of Rabbi Haim Yaakov Rottenberg (1909-1990) and grandson of Rabbi Markus Rottenberg (1872-1944), who was deported to Auschwitz where he died.
The Pavée Synagogue was Hector Guimard’s last major project before World War I, the only religious building he designed, and the last place of worship built in the Marais district.
The Pavée Synagogue is built on a narrow strip of land between older houses. It is developed in height, with the elongated windows and continuous columns of its façade emphasising its vertical impact. Inside, the synagogue is vertically arranged also, with two levels of galleries on each side of the nave to deal with the lack of width. The synagogue is Guimard’s only religious building. It has a narrow façade clad in white stone, whose surface curves and undulates while highlighting verticality.
Guimard used reinforced concrete for the building and he chose white stone for the exterior. Light enters through a number of windows in the façade, but much of the natural lighting is provided by the large glass window of the back wall.
The synagogue originally had skylights too. They were covered when the roof was renovated, but are still visible from inside.
Like with his previous projects, Guimard designed the interiors as well, organising the spaces and creating original furnishings that matched the architectural motifs of the structure. His furnishings include luminaires, chandeliers, brackets, and benches, as well as the stylised decorations and cast iron railings.
The triangle is a recurring symbol in the ornamentation and triangles were also present over the entrances, but were substituted by a single Star of David when the façade was restored.
Inside Pavée Synagogue (Photograph: G Freihalter / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The architect Hector Guimard (1867-1942) was a prominent figure in the Art Nouveau style, and he is best known for the glass and iron edicules or canopies, with ornamental Art Nouveau curves, that he designed for the entrances of the first stations of the Paris Metro.
Between 1890 and 1930, Guimard designed and built some 50 buildings, 141 subway entrances for Paris Metro, and numerous pieces of furniture and other decorative works. However, Art Nouveau went out of fashion in the 1910s, in the decade he was designing the Pavée Synagogue. By the 1960s, most of his works had been demolished, and only two of his original Metro edicules were still in place.
Guimard met the Belgian architect Victor Horta, one of the founders of Art Nouveau, in Brussels in 1895. and was strongly influenced by the Hotel Tassel, one of the earliest Art Nouveau houses.
Guimard’s earliest building was the cafe-restaurant Au Grand Neptune (1888), on the Quai Auteuil in Paris. His first recognised major work was the Castel Béranger in Paris, an apartment building with 36 units (1895-1898), when he was just 30.
The Hotel Béranger quickly brought Guimard new projects, including villas, a concert hall, and, most famously, entrances for the stations of the new Paris Metro, which was planned to open in 1900 in time for the Paris Universal Exposition.
Guimard’s Metro entrances were controversial from the beginning. After complaints that the his new balustrade at the Opera station was not in harmony with the architecture of the Palais Garnier opera house, the entrance was dismantled in 1904 and replaced it with a more classical model.
New stations continued being built using his design but without Guimard’s participation. Between 1900 and 1913, 167 entrances were installed, of which 66 survive.
The Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue on Rue Pavée was designed by Hector Guimard as Art Nouveau was already out of fashion
By the 1910s, Guimard was no longer the leader of Paris architectural fashion. But he continued to design and build residences, apartment buildings, and monuments, and to experiment with skylights. The Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue on Rue Pavée is one of his notable works from this period.
By the time World War I began in August 1914, Art Nouveau was already out of fashion, the army and war the economy took almost all available workers and building materials, and most of Guimard’s projects were shelved. He gave up his workshop, left Paris and lived through most of the war in Pau and Candes-Saint-Martin, where he wrote essays and pamphlets calling for an end to militarised society.
When he returned to Paris, he was unable to keep up with the rapid changes in styles and methods, and his firm finally closed in July 1925. One of his final works was the Guimard Building, an apartment building in the 16th arrondissement (1926-1928). He also designed several residential buildings and several war memorials and funeral monuments, and in 1929 he was named a Chevalier in the French Legion d’honneur.
Despite his successes, his late work appeared old fashioned, particularly compared with the modernism of Robert Mallet-Stevens, August Perret and Le Corbusier.
His wife Adeline Oppenheim (1872-1965) an American painter from a wealthy family, was Jewish, and a niece of Joseph Landau, the principal patron of the Pavée Synagogue. They were alarmed as World War II approached and moved to New York in September 1938. He died at the Hotel Adams on Fifth Avenue on 20 May 1942. His widow died in New York in 1965.
Many of Guimard’s buildings have been demolished or remodelled beyond recognition, and most of his original Metro station edicules and balustrades have been removed.
However, his reputation revived in the 1960s, in part due to acquisitions of his work by Museum of Modern Art. All his surviving Metro entrances – 88 of the original 167 put in place – were declared of historic value in 1978.
The streets of the Marais remain an important centre of Jewish life in Paris with their kosher food shops, bookshops, restaurants and cafés (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Many luxury brand shops have moved onto rue des Rosiers in recent years. A one-time community hammam, or steam bath, was in 2008 transformed into another link in the chain of Swedish fashion retailer H&M.
But these narrow, cobbled streets remain an important centre of Parisian Jewish life with their kosher food shops, bookshops, restaurants and cafés. Throughout the Marais, memorials plaques on many buildings are reminders of the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish community in Paris.
That afternoon this week, I also visited the Mémorial de la Shoah or Holocaust museum in Marais, the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr and the Museum of Jewish Art and History, and a number of smaller synagogues in the Marais.
But more about these visits on other days.
Hector Guimard invented his own typeface for his Metro edicules (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Shabbat Shalom
09 February 2024
Daily prayer in Ordinary
Time with French
saints and writers
7: 9 February 2024
André Trocmé (1901-1971) and Magda Trocmé (1901-1996) have been designated Righteous Among the Nations
Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time, the time between Candlemas and the 40 days of Lent, which begins next week on Ash Wednesday.
Charlotte and I are back in Stony Stratford, having spent two days in Paris. In these 11 days in Ordinary Time, my reflections each morning are drawing on the lives of 11 French saints and spiritual writers.
As this series of reflections began, I admitted I am often uncomfortable with many aspects of French spirituality, and that I need to broaden my reading in French spirituality. So, I have turned to 11 figures or writers you might not otherwise expect. They include men and women, Jews and Christians, immigrants and emigrants, monks and philosophers, Catholics and Protestants, and even a few Anglicans.
I have a medical appointment later today. But, before this day gets busy, I am taking some quiet time early this morning for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, A reflection on a French saint or writer in spirituality;
2, today’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
The Revd André Trocme (1901-1971) was the pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon for 15 years
French saints and writers: 7, André and Magda Trocmé:
André Trocmé (1901-1971) and his wife Magda Trocmé (1901-1996), a French couple, have been designated Righteous Among the Nations. For 15 years, André was a pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a remote parish on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in south-central France.
His Christian pacifist positions were not well received by the French Protestant Church. In his preaching, he spoke out against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in Germany and he urged his Huguenot congregation to hide Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during World War II.
André Trocmé was born on 7 April 1901 in Saint-Quentin-en-Tourmont to a large and economically comfortable Protestant family. When he was 10, his mother Pauline (Schwerdtmenn) died after a car crash, and he was raised by his distant but demanding father, Paul Trocmé, a prosperous curtain manufacturer.
His upbringing was sheltered and strict, but he faced reality when World War I reached his hometown. Trocmé was only 13 as he watched soldiers struggle through the streets after battle. In 1916 he saw the trains taking dead soldiers to the crematoria. His family was split between his mother's German heritage and his half-French brothers, and Trocmé became aware of the notions of identity and loyalty.
His views on pacifism matured through lengthy conversations with a young soldier about the ideals of nonviolence. When the young soldier was killed in battle, Trocmé became more committed to the ideals of pacifism.
When their town was bombed in 1917 by the Germans, the Trocmé family were evacuated to southern Belgium as refugees. This gave André Trocmé an understanding of what it meant to be poor, in contrast to the wealthy life he had known.
After World War I, the Trocmé family moved to Paris, where André studied at the Faculty of Protestant Theology and at the Sorbonne. His convictions about nonviolence and Christian socialism deepened as he studied the Bible and met many like-minded students like himself, including Edouard Theis (1899-1984), who would later join Trocmé in Le Chambon.
Trocmé’s studies were interrupted by conscription in 1921-1923). He did not resist because he wanted to experience the placement in Morocco. When his conscription ended, Trocmé and several of his university colleagues joined the French branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
He received a one-year bursary in 1925 for young French theologians from Union Theological Seminary, New York. There Trocmé was a tutor to the children of John D Rockefeller Jr to pay his expenses, and there too he met Magda Grilli, a Russian-Italian woman who was studying social work.
Magda Elisa Larissa Grilli di Cortona was born on 2 November 1901 in Florence. Her father was an Italian born into Florentine. Her Russian-born mother died shortly after giving birth, and for the rest of his wife Magda’s father was a distant figure.
A scholarship in 1925 enabled Magda to attended the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University. She and André met in New York, and they married in 1926.
André Trocmé’s first appointment as a pastor was in Maubeuge, a town in northern France that had been destroyed during World War I. Although French pastors at the time were prohibited from advocating conscientious objection, Trocmé supported men in his town who resisted conscription.
The Trocmé family stayed in Maubeuge for seven years. But by 1932 the dusty, polluted air was taking its toll on them. He searched for a new parish, but was turned down by the first two he applied to. The third, Le Chambon, was more open to pacifists and admired his faith.
André Trocmé and the Revd Edouard Theis founded the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in 1938, and it later became Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International. Its initial purpose was to prepare young local people to enter university. As war loomed on the horizon, it took in many young Jewish refugees who wished to continue their education.
When Nazi Germany overran France in 1940, André and Magda Trocmé became involved in a network organising the rescue of Jews fleeing Nazi deportations. When the Vichy regime was set up, Trocmé and neighbouring pastors area encouraged their congregations to shelter ‘the people of the Bible’ and for their cities to be a ‘city of refuge.’
Through Trocmé’s role as a catalyst, Le Chambon and surrounding villages became a haven in Nazi-occupied France. Trocmé and his church helped the town develop ways of resisting the Nazis, and they created a number of safe houses to hide Jews and other refugees.
The work was supported financially with contributions from Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Congregational Church in the US, the pacifist movement Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jewish and Christian groups, the French Protestant student organisation Cimade and Help to Children, based in Switzerland. This support helped to house and buy food for refugees. Many refugees escapes to Switzerland on an underground railroad network, many were placed in family homes and children were enrolled in schools using false names.
When the Vichy puppet regime demanded a list of all the Jews in the town, Trocmé refused to accept their definitions and told them: ‘These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock … I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.’
Anti-Jewish Vichy security agents were sent to search in the town, but most of their efforts were without success. One arrest by the Gestapo led to the death of several young Jewish men in deportation camps. Daniel Trocmé (1910-1944), the director of their residence, La Maison des Roches, was André Trocmé’s second cousin. He refused to let the young adults put in his care to be sent away without him. He was arrested and later murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp.
When Georges Lamirand, a minister in the Vichy government, visited Le Chambon on 15 August 1942, Trocmé forcibly told him of his views and beliefs. Days later, Vichy gendarmes were sent to the town to locate ‘illegal’ aliens. In the face of rumours that Trocmé was about to be arrested, he urged his parishioners to ‘do the will of God, not of men.’ He quoted Deuteronomy 19: 2-10, which speaks of the entitlement of the persecuted to shelter, ‘so that the blood of an innocent person may not be shed in the land.’ The gendarmes were unsuccessful and left the town.
Trocmé was arrested in February 1943, along with Edouard Theis and the school headmaster Roger Darcissac, and they were sent to Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux, near Limoges. They were released after four weeks and pressed to sign a commitment to obey all government orders. Although Trocmé and Theis refused, they were released and went underground. Trocmé continued to run the rescue and sanctuary efforts with the help of many friends and supporters.
After World War II, André and Magda were co-secretaries of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in Europe. During the Algerian War, they set up the group Eirene in Morocco, with the aid of the Mennonites, to help French conscientious objectors. They advocated for Algerian independence, demonstrated against nuclear weapons and campaigned for drafting a world constitution.
André Trocmé spent his final years as a Reformed Church pastor in Geneva, and died there on 5 June 1971; Magda died in Paris on 10 October 1996. They are buried together in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
Months before he died, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, recognised André Trocmé as Righteous among the Nations. His cousin Daniel Trocmé was recognised in March 1944, and Magda was recognised in July 1986.
The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon have become a symbol of the rescue of Jews in France during World War II. Yad Vashem honoured the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the neighbouring communities with an engraved stele in the memorial park. It was the second time Yad Vashem honoured a whole community, the first time being the Dutch village of Nieuwlande in 1988.
Muriel Rosenberg, in her book Mais combien étaient-ils? (2021), estimates that between 1940 and 1945, at least 2,000 Jewish refugees, including many children, were saved by the small village of Le Chambon and the communities on the surrounding plateau because the people resisted the demands of the Vichy and Nazi police and military.
Their contemporaries included the Revd Jacques Martin (1906-2001), a French pastor, pacifist and conscientious objector whose involvement in the Resistance and the protection of Jews brought him recognition from Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Baron Roland de Pury (1907-1979), a Swiss Protestant theologian, pastor and writer who lived in France during World War II, helped Jewish refugees to escape to Switzerland, and was arrested by the Gestapo. He too was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
The French theologian Madeleine Barot (1909-1995) was active in the Resistance, in human rights movement, and the early work of the World Council of Churches. She too was given the status of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Marie Elmes (1908-2002) from Cork, who worked with American Friends Service Committee in Perpignan during world War II, saved the lives of 200 Jewish children in Vichy France, hiding them in the boot of her car. She is the first Irish person honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
A plaque in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon commemorates the rescue of Jews by Magda and André Trocmé (Photograph: Pensées de Pascal / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mark 7: 31-37 (NRSVA):
31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ 35 And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’
A memorial at Yad Vashem recalls the extraordinary story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
Today’s Prayers (Friday 9 February 2024):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Gender Justice in Christ.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Ellen McMibanga, Zambia Anglican Council Outreach Programme.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (9 February 2024) invites us to pray in these words:
Help us O Lord to ensure that we treat everyone we encounter with respect and love.
The Collect:
Almighty God,
you have created the heavens and the earth
and made us in your own image:
teach us to discern your hand in all your works
and your likeness in all your children;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns supreme over all things,
now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
may we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Almighty God,
give us reverence for all creation
and respect for every person,
that we may mirror your likeness
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflection (Simon Weil, 1909-1943)
Continued Tomorrow (Thomas Merton, 1915-1968)
The Mary Elmes Bridge … the centrepiece is designed to create the impression of a menorah (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time, the time between Candlemas and the 40 days of Lent, which begins next week on Ash Wednesday.
Charlotte and I are back in Stony Stratford, having spent two days in Paris. In these 11 days in Ordinary Time, my reflections each morning are drawing on the lives of 11 French saints and spiritual writers.
As this series of reflections began, I admitted I am often uncomfortable with many aspects of French spirituality, and that I need to broaden my reading in French spirituality. So, I have turned to 11 figures or writers you might not otherwise expect. They include men and women, Jews and Christians, immigrants and emigrants, monks and philosophers, Catholics and Protestants, and even a few Anglicans.
I have a medical appointment later today. But, before this day gets busy, I am taking some quiet time early this morning for reflection, prayer and reading in these ways:
1, A reflection on a French saint or writer in spirituality;
2, today’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
The Revd André Trocme (1901-1971) was the pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon for 15 years
French saints and writers: 7, André and Magda Trocmé:
André Trocmé (1901-1971) and his wife Magda Trocmé (1901-1996), a French couple, have been designated Righteous Among the Nations. For 15 years, André was a pastor in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a remote parish on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in south-central France.
His Christian pacifist positions were not well received by the French Protestant Church. In his preaching, he spoke out against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in Germany and he urged his Huguenot congregation to hide Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during World War II.
André Trocmé was born on 7 April 1901 in Saint-Quentin-en-Tourmont to a large and economically comfortable Protestant family. When he was 10, his mother Pauline (Schwerdtmenn) died after a car crash, and he was raised by his distant but demanding father, Paul Trocmé, a prosperous curtain manufacturer.
His upbringing was sheltered and strict, but he faced reality when World War I reached his hometown. Trocmé was only 13 as he watched soldiers struggle through the streets after battle. In 1916 he saw the trains taking dead soldiers to the crematoria. His family was split between his mother's German heritage and his half-French brothers, and Trocmé became aware of the notions of identity and loyalty.
His views on pacifism matured through lengthy conversations with a young soldier about the ideals of nonviolence. When the young soldier was killed in battle, Trocmé became more committed to the ideals of pacifism.
When their town was bombed in 1917 by the Germans, the Trocmé family were evacuated to southern Belgium as refugees. This gave André Trocmé an understanding of what it meant to be poor, in contrast to the wealthy life he had known.
After World War I, the Trocmé family moved to Paris, where André studied at the Faculty of Protestant Theology and at the Sorbonne. His convictions about nonviolence and Christian socialism deepened as he studied the Bible and met many like-minded students like himself, including Edouard Theis (1899-1984), who would later join Trocmé in Le Chambon.
Trocmé’s studies were interrupted by conscription in 1921-1923). He did not resist because he wanted to experience the placement in Morocco. When his conscription ended, Trocmé and several of his university colleagues joined the French branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
He received a one-year bursary in 1925 for young French theologians from Union Theological Seminary, New York. There Trocmé was a tutor to the children of John D Rockefeller Jr to pay his expenses, and there too he met Magda Grilli, a Russian-Italian woman who was studying social work.
Magda Elisa Larissa Grilli di Cortona was born on 2 November 1901 in Florence. Her father was an Italian born into Florentine. Her Russian-born mother died shortly after giving birth, and for the rest of his wife Magda’s father was a distant figure.
A scholarship in 1925 enabled Magda to attended the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University. She and André met in New York, and they married in 1926.
André Trocmé’s first appointment as a pastor was in Maubeuge, a town in northern France that had been destroyed during World War I. Although French pastors at the time were prohibited from advocating conscientious objection, Trocmé supported men in his town who resisted conscription.
The Trocmé family stayed in Maubeuge for seven years. But by 1932 the dusty, polluted air was taking its toll on them. He searched for a new parish, but was turned down by the first two he applied to. The third, Le Chambon, was more open to pacifists and admired his faith.
André Trocmé and the Revd Edouard Theis founded the Ecole Nouvelle Cévenole in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in 1938, and it later became Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International. Its initial purpose was to prepare young local people to enter university. As war loomed on the horizon, it took in many young Jewish refugees who wished to continue their education.
When Nazi Germany overran France in 1940, André and Magda Trocmé became involved in a network organising the rescue of Jews fleeing Nazi deportations. When the Vichy regime was set up, Trocmé and neighbouring pastors area encouraged their congregations to shelter ‘the people of the Bible’ and for their cities to be a ‘city of refuge.’
Through Trocmé’s role as a catalyst, Le Chambon and surrounding villages became a haven in Nazi-occupied France. Trocmé and his church helped the town develop ways of resisting the Nazis, and they created a number of safe houses to hide Jews and other refugees.
The work was supported financially with contributions from Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Congregational Church in the US, the pacifist movement Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jewish and Christian groups, the French Protestant student organisation Cimade and Help to Children, based in Switzerland. This support helped to house and buy food for refugees. Many refugees escapes to Switzerland on an underground railroad network, many were placed in family homes and children were enrolled in schools using false names.
When the Vichy puppet regime demanded a list of all the Jews in the town, Trocmé refused to accept their definitions and told them: ‘These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock … I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.’
Anti-Jewish Vichy security agents were sent to search in the town, but most of their efforts were without success. One arrest by the Gestapo led to the death of several young Jewish men in deportation camps. Daniel Trocmé (1910-1944), the director of their residence, La Maison des Roches, was André Trocmé’s second cousin. He refused to let the young adults put in his care to be sent away without him. He was arrested and later murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp.
When Georges Lamirand, a minister in the Vichy government, visited Le Chambon on 15 August 1942, Trocmé forcibly told him of his views and beliefs. Days later, Vichy gendarmes were sent to the town to locate ‘illegal’ aliens. In the face of rumours that Trocmé was about to be arrested, he urged his parishioners to ‘do the will of God, not of men.’ He quoted Deuteronomy 19: 2-10, which speaks of the entitlement of the persecuted to shelter, ‘so that the blood of an innocent person may not be shed in the land.’ The gendarmes were unsuccessful and left the town.
Trocmé was arrested in February 1943, along with Edouard Theis and the school headmaster Roger Darcissac, and they were sent to Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux, near Limoges. They were released after four weeks and pressed to sign a commitment to obey all government orders. Although Trocmé and Theis refused, they were released and went underground. Trocmé continued to run the rescue and sanctuary efforts with the help of many friends and supporters.
After World War II, André and Magda were co-secretaries of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in Europe. During the Algerian War, they set up the group Eirene in Morocco, with the aid of the Mennonites, to help French conscientious objectors. They advocated for Algerian independence, demonstrated against nuclear weapons and campaigned for drafting a world constitution.
André Trocmé spent his final years as a Reformed Church pastor in Geneva, and died there on 5 June 1971; Magda died in Paris on 10 October 1996. They are buried together in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
Months before he died, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, recognised André Trocmé as Righteous among the Nations. His cousin Daniel Trocmé was recognised in March 1944, and Magda was recognised in July 1986.
The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon have become a symbol of the rescue of Jews in France during World War II. Yad Vashem honoured the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the neighbouring communities with an engraved stele in the memorial park. It was the second time Yad Vashem honoured a whole community, the first time being the Dutch village of Nieuwlande in 1988.
Muriel Rosenberg, in her book Mais combien étaient-ils? (2021), estimates that between 1940 and 1945, at least 2,000 Jewish refugees, including many children, were saved by the small village of Le Chambon and the communities on the surrounding plateau because the people resisted the demands of the Vichy and Nazi police and military.
Their contemporaries included the Revd Jacques Martin (1906-2001), a French pastor, pacifist and conscientious objector whose involvement in the Resistance and the protection of Jews brought him recognition from Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Baron Roland de Pury (1907-1979), a Swiss Protestant theologian, pastor and writer who lived in France during World War II, helped Jewish refugees to escape to Switzerland, and was arrested by the Gestapo. He too was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
The French theologian Madeleine Barot (1909-1995) was active in the Resistance, in human rights movement, and the early work of the World Council of Churches. She too was given the status of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Marie Elmes (1908-2002) from Cork, who worked with American Friends Service Committee in Perpignan during world War II, saved the lives of 200 Jewish children in Vichy France, hiding them in the boot of her car. She is the first Irish person honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
A plaque in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon commemorates the rescue of Jews by Magda and André Trocmé (Photograph: Pensées de Pascal / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mark 7: 31-37 (NRSVA):
31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32 They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34 Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ 35 And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36 Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37 They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’
A memorial at Yad Vashem recalls the extraordinary story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
Today’s Prayers (Friday 9 February 2024):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Gender Justice in Christ.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by Ellen McMibanga, Zambia Anglican Council Outreach Programme.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (9 February 2024) invites us to pray in these words:
Help us O Lord to ensure that we treat everyone we encounter with respect and love.
The Collect:
Almighty God,
you have created the heavens and the earth
and made us in your own image:
teach us to discern your hand in all your works
and your likeness in all your children;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns supreme over all things,
now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God our creator,
by your gift
the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,
and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:
may we who have been nourished at your table on earth
be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross
and enjoy the delights of eternity;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Almighty God,
give us reverence for all creation
and respect for every person,
that we may mirror your likeness
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflection (Simon Weil, 1909-1943)
Continued Tomorrow (Thomas Merton, 1915-1968)
The Mary Elmes Bridge … the centrepiece is designed to create the impression of a menorah (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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