Judith Hemmendinger

Judith Hemmendinger was born in 1923 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe

Judith Feist was born in 1923 in Bad Homburg, Germany, to a well-off Orthodox Jewish family. Her father Phillip was a mining engineer from Frankfurt. When she was a child, the family moved to France, where the children went to public school and studied Hebrew and the Bible at home.

During World War II her father was arrested and later deported to Auschwitz in 1943, where he was murdered. In 1942 she began working at a hostel for hidden children run by the OSE, and in 1943 she joined a secret Zionist training farm under a false name. That year she fled with her mother and siblings over the Alps to Switzerland, where she trained as a social worker and helped identify refugee children.

In 1945 she volunteered to care for child survivors of Buchenwald and became director of a home for religious boys in France. She ran it until 1947, when the last child was placed. Among the boys were Yisrael Meir Lau and Elie Wiesel.

She married Claude Hemmendinger and moved to Israel, living in Jerusalem. In 1981 she earned a doctorate from the University of Strasbourg and wrote books on child survivors. She received the French Legion of Honor in 2003 and died in 2024.