Nazi Hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld Win Legion of Honor
Nazi hunters, a fertility specialist and a Tunisia-born journalist are among the Jewish recipients in 2013 of France’s Legion of Honor award.
The Holocaust scholar and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, 79, was named Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor — the order’s second highest degree. His wife and partner, Beate Klarsfeld, received the lower distinction of commander, according to the French government’s annual honors decree published on Tuesday.
The Klarsfelds, who were made members of the order in 1984, were promoted for their work for preserving the memory of the Holocaust.
Dr. Rene Frydman, a gynecologist from southwestern France, also was named commander of the order for his work in advancing medicine. Frydman, 71, is responsible for the first successful in vitro fertilization, among other breakthroughs. He is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland.
Other Jewish recipients include the Tunisia native Michele Fitoussi, a former editor of Elle women’s magazine, for her writing on social issues, including in the book “Stolen Lives.” The book, which tells the true story of a woman who was kidnapped as a girl by Morocco’s royal family, was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club in 2001.
Fitoussi was made chevalier, the lowest of the order’s five degrees of distinction.
Another chevalier was Nicole Bornstein, the top representative of the Jewish community of the Lyon region in southeastern France to CRIF, the umbrella organization of French Jewish communities, for her fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO