Un rabbin dans la tourmente (1940-1944) : dans les camps d'internement et au sein de l'Organisation juive de combat
Kapel recounts his wartime experiences as a Jewish chaplain in the internment camps of Gurs, Noé, Récébédou, and Le Vernet, in the village of Aulus-les-Bains where Jews were held under house arrest, and in the Jewish resistance in France. Between 1940-43 he was stationed in Toulouse, where he had been sent as a chaplain in the French army just before the Nazi occupation. He mobilized the Jewish community of Toulouse and the French Rabbinate to help the Jewish inmates in the camps, and contacted Jewish and non-Jewish, French and foreign organizations for the same purpose. In 1943, fearing arrest by the Gestapo, he fled to Grenoble. Already a member of the Zionist Organisation Juive de Combat (O.J.C.), he began to collaborate with that organization and the with the Éclaireurs Israélites, which continued its work illegally as the Sixième. Kapel was arrested in Paris in 1944 while trying to reach London, having been charged by the O.J.C. with the mission of forming a Jewish military division within the British army. He jumped from the train taking him to Buchenwald, together with 28 other members of the resistance, and reached liberated Paris. After the war he worked as chief chaplain of the Jewish youth in France. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism)
Print Book, French, 1986, ©1985
Éditions du Centre, Paris, 1986, ©1985