Wilhelm Filderman et Alexandre Safran pendant la Shoah. L’homme de loi et l’homme de foi
Wilhelm Filderman and Alexandre Safran during the Shoah. The Man of Law and the Man of Faith

Summary/Abstract: The first part of the article evokes the main interventions in favor of Romanian Jews undertaken by Wilhelm Filderman, the political leader of the Jewish community of Romania, and Alexandre Safran, its spiritual leader, underlining the assistance provided to their brethren deported to Transnistria and their decisive actions of 1942 designed to avoid the total deportation to the Nazi camps in Poland. The second part provides an analysis of the personalities of the two leaders, who were engaged in the same struggle, but whose relations were not exempt from frictions. Numerous documents, including notes, reports and testimonies, indicate that their relations were marked by the delicate issue of leadership. Despite their different personalities, Filderman and Safran were essentially complementary in their actions: the former made use of an elaborated legal dialectic, the latter of a strong moral message. Besides, their interlocutors were probably not sensitive to the same arguments. One should take a nuanced approach, neither exaggerate the role of one, nor minimize the role of the other. However, in his Black Book, Matatias Carp does not once mention the name of the chief rabbi, and in Filderman’s posthumous memoirs Safran’s action is systematically ignored. In fact, it was the conjugation of these two Jewish leaders’ efforts that would prove decisive and provide us with the key to understanding the particular destiny of the Romanian Jewish community during the Holocaust.

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