My father' Mother, Henriette Antébi (1873-1954), whose history I have related in detail in my book Les Missionnaires Juifs de la France, Calmann-Lévy, 1999), was born in Château-Salins on the 27th of March 1873, into one of those families from Alsace-Lorraine who, after the 1870 War and the Treaty of Frankfurt (which gave Alsace and Lorraine to Germany), “chose France” : she was just a little girl when she went, with her parents, her sister and her brother, to live in Chalons-sur-Marne.

Her father, Victor Salomon (1840-1886), was the son of Moïse Salomon, born in 1791 - the year of the Law of Emancipation of Jews in France by the Abbé Grégoire – and of Elisabeth Worms (1802-1858). He married Eugénie Weyl, the daughter of a very well-read rabbi from the region of Nancy (East of France). When her husband died, quite young, Eugenie had to manage their shop, Docks Rémois, in Chalons ;

Henriette à vingt ans. 
Elle a 72 ans l'année où elle me porte bébé,

et enfin 75 ans pour l'anniversaire de mes trois ans.

They lived 19, rue d’Orfeuil.

L'enveloppe du testament de Victor Salomon, envoyée à Chalons, suivit à Tunis.

Henriette was sent, then, to boarding school of Raucourt, rue du Grenier-à-sel, and then to the very fashionable Sévigné high school for girls. The law, instigated by Camille Sée permitting education for women, being very recent (1880), she was one of the first to attain the qualification of teacher at the school of La Hay-les Roses.

On the 1st April 1897, in Jerusalem, she married Albert Antébi.

They would have eight children :

In the photo, left, around 1908, my father is the child on the far right. In the photo on the right, in 1915, the two eldest are absent, in France. The family is on the point of being exiled to Damascus, and then, Constantinople. In the photo, below, one after the other, André, born in 1898, enlisted in 1914 in the Foreign Legion (he was still Ottoman), and then transferred to the French army; my father Gaston, born in 1900, long time President of the Students Association of Paris, parachutist in London with de Gaulle, during the Second World War, in the SAS; Renée, Marcel, Margot, Paul, Germaine, Simone.

Après guerre, Henriette Antébi est nommée en 1922 à la tête de l’école de formation des institutrices pour l’Orient de l’AIU, à Versailles. Pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, réfugiée à Toulouse, elle emmène avec elle une poignée de jeunes filles du Maroc et de Salonique, isolées de leur famille, qu’elle fait fuir par le réseau Abadi.

In 1922, after the war, Henriette Antébi became Principal of the Versailles School for the Education of Women Teachers for the Orient. During the Second World War, she took refuge in Toulouse, with a handful of young girls from Morocco and Salonique, who were able at that time to fly, thanks to the Abadi network.

Henriette’sister, Lucie, also ran many schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), in Constantinople, Constantine and Paris. She had married a writer and school principal, Albert Navon (in the photo, Lucie’s response to his marriage proposal), born in Andrinople. They had three daughters : all the documents and letters of the family can be read at the Archives of AIU, in Paris.

Their brother Roger died during the First World War, as a soldier, at Chemin des Dames.

Their brother Roger died during the First World War, as a soldier, at Chemin des Dames.