#Alfred dreyfus father of zionist free#

His course in electronics served him well, as he immigrated to America, and eventually founded a technology company. After years on the run without an education, Alfred was able to learn a trade in their last Swiss internment camp. Dreyfus remembers one of the camps feeling nearly as torturous as he imagined the German concentration camps to be, though without the threat of death.

#Alfred dreyfus father of zionist free#

They were lucky to be among the 5% of refugees allowed to stay, but they were not free – they were housed in a succession of internment camps. What are new are not so much facts as two new factors: to begin with, my concern is much less about the Dreyfus Affair than it is about the mans life and. Toward the end of the war, the family used the last of their savings to pay a smuggler to get them into Switzerland, where they were immediately arrested. Although he was cleared of all charges, the incident polarised many European Jews at the time. The Dreyfus Affair was an incident in which a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, in the French Army was falsely accused and convicted of treason. Frequently, they narrowly avoided being discovered and sent “east” on trains with millions of other Jewish men, women and children, including close family members, who were killed during the Holocaust. Particularly the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus Affair sparked outrage among the Jewish people. At times they hid in a cave, found shelter with compassionate French citizens, and even bunked in a hayloft and an 8 x 10-foot former pig pen. Alfred Dreyfus, subject of the antisemitic Dreyfus Affair that inspired Zionist founding father Theodor Herzl, was described in a BBC drama summary as a 'Jewish spy' despite being. Beginning in 1938, they moved often, including fleeing Paris with tens of thousands of others as the Germans approached in 1940. They knew if they stayed in one place for any length of time they would be killed immediately or sent to labor or concentration camps.

The reality was bleak, however, and the family found themselves on the run because of their German-Jewish heritage. He was raised in a well-to-do home, received a basic Jewish education, and was educated in the spirit of the German-Jewish Enlightenment of the period, which. His father, a factory owner, saw the increasing antisemitism in Germany in the early 1930s, foresaw another war, and thought that in France he and his wife could raise their three sons safely. Correspondents include many prominent Jewish rabbis, scholars, laymen, and. Alfred Dreyfus was born in Germany in 1923. The letters are primarily written in English with some in Hebrew and German.