The American Jewish Committee reported today that a survey showed that integration of the more than 200, 000 immigrant North African Jews into French life was being substantially aided by their increasing intermarriage with native-born French Jews and French Jews of Eastern European origin.
The survey studied Jewish marriages from 1955, when the North African movement to France started in large numbers, through June 1962. In 1955, only three percent of native-born French Jews married Jews of North African origin. But, by 1962, the proportion had risen to 42 percent. Only five percent of Jews of Eastern European origin married Jews from North Africa in 1955 but, by 1962, the proportion had reached 32 percent.
The survey was one in a series of 11 studies in various parts of Europe on major aspects of postwar Jewish life sponsored by the Community Service, an organization founded by the AJC Foreign Affairs Department, the Alliance Israelite Universelle of France, and the Anglo-Jewish Association.
(In New York, Morris B. Abram, AJC president, said that the integration of Algerian Jews was “extremely important for the future of French Jewry, ” which now totals 500, 000, the fourth largest Jewish community in the world.)
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
