The Amazing Story of Alexander Glasberg

By Nick Lampert

Who was Alexander Glasberg? A Jewish émigré from the former Russian empire who settled in France in 1932 and became a Catholic priest. A Yiddish-speaking polyglot. A man of astonishing audacity who saved many Jews during the German occupation. After narrowly escaping from the clutches of the Gestapo in Lyon in 1942, he appeared under an assumed name as a parish priest in south-west France, where he joined the local Resistance.



After the Liberation he moved to Paris and set up an entirely secular organisation, COS, to help people to find their feet in France after the traumas of the war. It provided a unique combination of services for asylum-seekers, for the elderly and for the disabled. Forty years after the death of the founder in 1981, the COS Alexander Glasberg Foundation is much bigger but remains strikingly faithful to the ideals which inspired its beginnings.



Abbé Glasberg was a free spirit who evaded all conventional boxes. A priest outside the Church. An ardent Francophile yet passionate defender of refugees. A Zionist yet strong supporter of the Palestinian people. A sociable yet also secretive figure. This book traces key moments in his remarkable life and sheds light on a mesmerising personality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self Publishing Partnership
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839523878

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE GLASBERG FAMILY: THE EARLY YEARS

This chapter draws on information supplied by my grandmother Tatyana, on Roger Millot’s contribution to the Study Day on Alexander Glasberg in Lyon in 2012,¹ and on the diary of a visit to Novaya Chertoriya and Zhitomir in 2008, places associated with Alexander Glasberg’s family.

²

Volynia

Alexander Glasberg was born on 17 March 1902 in Zhitomir, the capital of the Ukrainian province of Volynia, into a Russian-speaking Jewish family. Volynia was then within the Russian empire. The province had once been under Polish rule but along with most of Ukraine was annexed by Russia in the 1790s after the partition of Poland. Volynia became part of the so-called Pale of Settlement, established as a result of the decision by Catherine II in the late 18th century to restrict the areas where Jews in the Russian empire might live and work.³ As a result, by the end of the 19th century Volynia had a large Jewish population, about 13 per cent in the province as a whole, 50 per cent (35,000) in the provincial capital Zhitomir, mainly involved in commerce and finance.⁴

Volynia benefitted from fertile soil, with an economy dominated by agriculture (crop cultivationand animal husbandry), together with forestry and some small-scale industry.⁵ It was cultivated by a poor peasantry. Ownership of land, previously in the hands of the Polish nobility, had passed to the Russian (or Russified Polish) and Ukrainian land-owning class.⁶

The Glasberg family before the revolution

Alexander Glasberg was born in Zhitomir and went to school there, but the main family home was in the village of Novaya Chertoriya, about 80 kilometres to the west. He was one of eight children, seven of whom survived into adulthood: Irina, Lev, Tatyana (my grandmother), Asya, Adela (Dusya), Alexander, Victor (Vila). Their father Savelii Gershovich Glasberg (1861–c.1933) was an able man of business, with little formal education. (‘Savelii’ – the Russian version of the Hebrew ‘Shevel’ – was used within the family, and ‘Shevel’ in official documents.) Savelii married Berta Moiseevna Numsonicz (1864–1928) in 1884. She had been tutored at home and was more cultivated than him (she had even attended lectures on art in Switzerland), but she respected his entrepreneurial talents. She was the daughter of his employer, a man of considerable means, with property that included several taverns and a flour mill.

After the death of Berta’s father, Savelii was asked to manage the businesses that his mother-in-law had inherited, and he later developed his own commercial interests. He rented a flour mill from a local aristocrat, the widow of a colonel of the Tsarist gendarmerie under Nicholas II, Natalya Ivanovna Orzhevskaya.⁷ This was a common arrangement at the time and Savelii Glasberg did very well. He employed 31 workers in the mill in 1905 and 36 in 1910, a large workforce in Volynia by the standards of the time, about 20 of whom were housed in a building which he put up at the edge of the village.⁸

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Savelii Gershovich Glasberg (1861–c.1933)

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Berta Moiseevna Numsonicz (1864–1928)

Following a fire Glasberg was able to replace the original wooden structure with a stone edifice. According to village rumour the fire was suspicious: Glasberg had organised it in order to get the insurance money to replace it with a modern building! That story had been passed down and was still being told by an elderly resident of Novaya Chertoriya when I visited the village in 2008.⁹

The mill still stands today and is a heritage site. It is an imposing structure on four floors, undoubtedly ‘state of the art’ at the time it was built. No member of the Glasberg family has lived in Novaya Chertoriya since about 1921, yet the mill is still known by the locals as the ‘Glasberg mill’, as I discovered during my 2008 visit – a striking continuity in the face of the 20th century violence and upheavals experienced in this part of the world.

In addition to the flour mill Savelii acquired interests in forestry and sugar production, and in 1905 a house in Zhitomir at 14, Ulitsa Chernigovskaya, purchased from Nikolai Lukich Pustovoitov, documented in a contract drawn up by a Zhitomir lawyer.¹⁰ In that year he referred to this as his place of residence for the purposes of the electoral register for the forthcoming Duma (parliament).

He was, then, a man of substance within a world of peasant farming and very small-scale industry. In 1907 he figured in a list of traders who had acquired a certificate of ‘bourgeois’ status.

He was a ‘merchant of the first guild’ and paid for his membership in the capital St Petersburg, rather than locally, a sign of relatively high status.

The family lived in a large single-storey brick house in Novaya Chertoriya. This property still stands, now multi-occupied. As with the mill, the family name is still mentioned: in 2008 the locals were still calling the house ‘Glasberg’. Evdokiya Leontievna Kanchura, a kind widow of 86, showed me her apartment, and later I was introduced to another elderly lady Olga, who occupied another part of the house. Olga explained that her mother, who lived to the age 96, had at the age of 12 been employed as a nanny to two young Glasberg children!

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The Glasberg mill next to the village sign: in Ukrainian Nova (N) Chortoriya (in Russian Novaya Chertoriya)

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Another view of the mill, built on a branch of the river Sluch

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View of Glasberg House 2008

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Olga, whose mother was a nanny to two Glasberg children. 2008

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The author with Evdokiya Kanchura 2008

Savelii Glasberg was a self-made man with little formal education, but according to Tatyana he became more ‘intelligentsia-like’ under the influence of his wife. He was a Russophile, while his politics were western-liberal. He joined the Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) party and was overjoyed by the February 1917 Revolution, but not all by the Bolshevik revolution in October.

Savelii was no doubt a fair employer by the standards of the period, but the early years of the 20th century were times of ferment among the working class throughout the Russian empire, and around 1907, he faced a strike by his mill workers. Tatyana recalled that this strike was during a vacation in her second year at St Petersburg university, and that she and her older brother Lev, who had become fervently socialist (their older sister Irina to a lesser extent), took the side of the strikers and encouraged them during clandestine meetings. When he found out about this Savelii was furious and commanded the offending children to leave the house, he would not have enemies living there! It was, Tatyana said, a ‘terrible tragedy for the family’. Evidently the threat was not carried out, but it left its mark on the relationship between the father and the three older children (the four younger siblings were too young to have been involved).

Tatyana recalled that the strike went on for four days and that it was quite successful, since the workers did get a wage increase. There were other demands, including sick pay and a change in holidays, so that the Jewish workers (about a quarter of the workforce) would be allowed to observe Jewish holidays, while the Christians would continue to observe Christian holidays. In addition, the workers demanded to be addressed using the polite ‘you’ (vy), not the familiar ‘thou’ (ty). Tatyana remembered that the chief engineer at the mill did start to say ‘vy’, but her father was too fixed in his ways.

A secular Jewish background

Savelii’s father was a Hassid (in a part of the Russian empire that had given birth to Hassidism), and Berta’s mother a devout Jew, and there was a prayer house in Novaya Chertoriya¹¹, but neither parent practised the faith. They were secular in orientation, part of the Jewish community in a cultural not a religious sense. Thus Alexander was listed in the Jewish civil register (as no doubt all the Glasberg children), where his circumcision was also recorded.¹² He also learned Yiddish, which greatly impressed those who came to know him in later years as abbé Glasberg. (A Catholic priest who knows Yiddish?!) The main influence here was very likely his maternal grandmother whom he adored, and he would say that all he knew of Judaism he had learnt from her.¹³ Tatyana too spoke in glowing terms about this grandmother, whom she remembered saying prayers in Hebrew. Judaism as a faith was thus present in the wider environment, but it was absent within the immediate family. This is worth remembering when considering Alexander’s trajectory. He became a Christian in adulthood, but it would be misleading to say that in doing so he was turning away from Judaism, since the Jewish religious foundation was weak to begin with.

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Alexander Glasberg: registration of birth and circumcision 25 April and 4 May 1902

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Letter from parents of Jewish pupils dated 21 September 1916, addressed to the head of Gymnasium no 2 in Zhitomir, asking that the Jewish religion be taught in all classes

I imagine that Alexander Glasberg spent his first years in Novaya Chertoriya, up to the time that he went to gymnasium (secondary school) no. 2 in Zhitomir. Here, during a period of war and revolution (he was 15 at the time of the October Revolution), he completed his secondary education, graduating in April 1919. The teaching was thorough, but the school received complaints from some Jewish parents that Judaism was being neglected. A collective letter dated 21 September 1916, addressed to the school head, called on him to organise the teaching of the Jewish religion in all classes.¹⁴

The young Alexander was evidently a bright pupil, and especially good at sciences and languages, as indicated in a graduation report with marks from 0 to 5: Ukrainian language and literature 3; Russian language and literature 3, geography 3; general history 4; Ukrainian history 4; Ukrainian geography 4; philosophy 4; Latin 5; mathematics 5; physics 5; natural sciences 5; German 5; French 5.

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Alexander Glasberg’s graduation diploma 1919

World war, revolution and civil war

Alexander Glasberg’s schooling was at a time of huge upheaval in Ukraine. It became a battleground for the belligerents in the First World War (Austro-Hungary, Germany and Russia), and then after the Russian revolution of 1917 for the red and white armies battling it out during the civil war of 1918–1920 – all complicated by Polish claims on Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian nationalist forces fighting for a Ukrainian state. There was a short-lived period of Ukrainian independence, but the nationalist current was divided and finally broken by Soviet power, which took possession of most of this devastated land in 1921.

This period, especially the year 1919, also saw a wave of pogroms (attacks on Jews and their property), recalling earlier waves in 1881–1883 and 1903–1906. In the Russian revolutionary period 1918–1921, 1,236 ‘pogroms and excesses’ were recorded in the territories of Ukraine, three quarters of which occurred in 1919, with estimates of numbers of Jews killed in the tens of thousands.¹⁵

The Glasberg parents leave for the West with Adela, Alexander and Victor

In 1920 the Glasberg parents decided to leave. According to Tatyana this decision was less a reaction to Bolshevism as such, more a result of the political chaos and lawlessness which reigned in the territory of Ukraine during the civil war period, before Soviet power was finally established, when competing armed groups (including Soviet Russian, White Russian, Ukrainian nationalist and Polish forces, and various armed peasant bands) were active, none being able to establish supremacy. The pogroms of 1919 may well have played a part also. The Glasberg family was not directly affected, but the anti-Jewish currents must surely have added to the sense of insecurity.

Once Soviet power was established in 1921, the Glasberg house and mill were confiscated, but the family had managed to export some of its wealth. The parents went to Vienna, taking with them their three youngest children Adela, Alexander and Victor. A Glasberg relative was already living there and no doubt received them. Three of the older siblings, Irina, Lev and Asya, remained in Soviet Russia. Tatyana stayed until 1923, when she departed for Berlin with her two young sons, to join her husband who had settled there one or two years before.

The Glasberg parents and younger children stayed in Vienna for perhaps two years, during which time Alexander studied in a business school.¹⁶ Then they moved to Poland, where the parents had bought an estate near Grudziadz, a town on the Vistula 100 kilometres south of Gdansk. For a while Alexander helped to manage it, but according to Tatyana he got on badly with his mother and this arrangement was not successful.

Meanwhile Savelii was unhappy in Poland and yearned for home. At some point in the 1920s he decided to return on his own, and found employment in the management of a flour-milling cooperative. He succeeded in persuading the Soviet authorities that he was divorced, and remarried. He apparently died a natural death in the 1930s. Berta stayed on the Polish estate for a time, then moved to Belgium. She died in 1928, during one of her visits to Tatyana in Berlin.

Unfortunately, there is very little information about Alexander’s activities during the 1920s. Along with the years spent in Vienna and in Poland, where he acquired Polish nationality, this period included some time spent in Berlin, and at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, in Yugoslavia. Here he worked as head of a trading house which had headquarters in Berlin, and as ‘Chancellor of the National Union of Yugoslav Farmers’. It was from Belgrade that he arrived in France in April 1932, around the same time as his sister Tatyana and two or three years after his younger brother Victor.

By that time AG had embarked on a religious path, becoming first a Lutheran then a Catholic. This strand in the story is taken up in the next chapter.

Some notes on Alexander’s siblings

I provide below some information about Alexander’s siblings, together with a family tree. Most of what I know revolves around my grandmother Tatyana, of whom I was very fond and who reminisced about her life. She lost contact with her brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union and Poland in the 1930s and during the Cold War. Certain contacts were resumed in the 1960s, in particular with Adela, but for the time being the information here must remain very sketchy.

Irina (1887–1971) became an actress and director and a leading figure in the development of children’s theatre in the Soviet Union. She began her career in Ukraine, the first female theatre director in that region. In the 1920s she was chief director of the Kiev Youth Theatre and one of the founders of the Kiev Puppet Theatre, and in the 1930s and 1940s successively head of the Dnepropetrovsk, Archangelsk and Novosibirsk Youth Theatres. In the latter part of her life she lived in Moscow. She married (the marriage did not last long) and had one son Yurii Brodsky, who emigrated to Poland in the early 1920s, joined the Communist Party, rose to a high rank in the Polish army and fought with the partisans in the wartime Resistance. In 1948, during the post-war Beirut regime (1947–1952), he was tried on charges of bribery and corruption, and sentenced to death. Many Polish wartime military leaders (including the ‘hero of Auschwitz’ Witold Pilecki) met a similar end,¹⁷ and it is very likely that the trial was politically inspired. Alexander Glasberg, who had links with the Polish government and was respected in Poland because of his wartime Resistance activities, tried to intercede for his nephew, but without success.

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Irina (1887–1971)

Lev (c. 1889–1941?) trained as an engineer and settled in Kiev. He was committed to the new Soviet order and joined the Communist Party. He married and had two daughters. My grandmother Tatyana told me that he was killed in the Second World War during the German occupation of Ukraine. There is a puzzle about the timing of Lev’s death, because when Alexander first applied for French citizenship in 1935 and provided details about his family, Lev was not mentioned.

Tatyana told me that during the immediate post-revolutionary period she lived for a time in ‘Chertori’ with other members of the Glasberg family including Lev, in the house that had belonged to her maternal grandparents. The house had been confiscated by the Soviet authorities, but the family was allowed to occupy one wing on condition that the adults helped out on the land. This group included Tatyana and her two sons Alexei and Genya and (briefly) Tatyana’s husband Ilya, together with Lev, Asya with her two children Tolya and Mura, and Irina’s son Yurii. Tatyana also said that Lev visited her in Berlin during the 1920s. What happened to Lev subsequently remains to be established.

Tatyana (1891–1985) was born in Novaya Chertoriya. At the age of about 16 she embarked on a law course at the university of St Petersburg. This was during the aftermath of the 1905 revolution when student life was highly politicised. Here she identified with the Bolshevik wing of the Russian socialist movement. She remained left-leaning all her life, but her Bolshevik involvement was brief, to be replaced by an interest in Russian philosophers who were moving away from social democracy towards religion, including Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937).

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Tatyana, Zhitomir, 1904

During her fourth year at university she met Ilya Lampert, a lawyer, also from a Jewish family. His father was a banker who had moved from Grodno (where Ilya was born) and settled in Warsaw. Ilya studied law in Kiev and later worked in St Petersburg. They married in 1910 or 1911, and Tatyana abandoned her university course. Ilya had already been married, and had a very young daughter Ida, but had separated from his wife a year before meeting Tatyana. After their marriage they lived for a time with her in-laws in Warsaw, where she was not happy, then returned to St Petersburg after the birth of her first son Alexei (Alyosha) in 1912. Later, before the onset of the First World War, she moved with Ilya and Alexei to Munich, where Ilya was seconded to do research on social insurance law. Here a second son Evgenii (Genya) was born in 1914.

After the outbreak of war Ilya was interned, but soon released, went back to Russia and was mobilised. Tatyana returned in 1915 or 1916, after a long return journey via Sweden, Great Britain and France. Following the February 1917 Revolution Ilya resumed his legal career in Petrograd. However, after the October Revolution life became very difficult for him professionally, and in 1920 or 1921 he left for Berlin, where he set up an office dealing with the legal side of trade with Russia, leaving Tatyana and her sons in Russia.

For a time Tatyana lived in Novaya Chertoriya with some members of her wider family. Then in 1923, following a spell in the Caucasus, she rejoined her husband in Berlin, together with her two sons. During this period, before her departure from Russia, she was baptised in the Orthodox church, and also baptised her sons, a démarche which at first caused great tension in her marriage because she did not tell her husband about it at the time and because he was entirely out of sympathy with her religious preoccupations.

Ilya Lampert died in 1928, following surgery for a stomach ulcer. Tatyana remained in Berlin for a few more years, then left for France with her sons Alyosha and Genya. Here she trained as a nurse and settled in Paris. Genya studied theology at the University of Strasbourg, then at the Saint-Serge Institute in Paris. He was influenced by Sergei Bulgakov and, outside the Institute, by Nikolai Berdyaev. In June 1939 he came on a visit to Britain, furnished only with a travel document. War was declared in September and he was not able to return to France. Meanwhile, he met Katharine Ridley (1912–1976). They married in 1941 and settled in Oxford. Alexander (Tosha) was born in 1943 and I was born in 1945.

In the 1950s Genya Lampert abandoned theology, became inspired by the Russian revolutionary tradition, and published several works on 19th-century Russian social thinkers. He taught at Oxford University in a freelance capacity and then in 1965 was appointed to the University of Keele as head of the Department of Russian Studies. Katharine died in 1976 and he in 2004.

At the end of the 1930s, Tatyana’s older son Alexei (Alyosha), wanting to contribute to the war effort, joined the Foreign Legion and in this capacity was posted to Algeria. Here he met his future wife Camille Cabrera. They had two sons Stephan (born in 1945) and Philippe (1947–2008). After Algerian independence in 1962, Alexei settled once more in France. Camille and he separated and in the latter part of his life he was based in England.

At the end of the 1950s, after retirement, Tatyana came to live in Oxford to be closer to Genya.

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Four generations: Tatyana right, Genya left, the author with his first child Katie centre. Oxford 1969

Asya (c.1894–c.1950), like Lev, was committed to the new Soviet regime and joined the Communist Party. She trained in medicine and became a specialist in respiratory disease. She married at the age of 17, divorced and remarried. She had a son Tolya and a daughter Mura. Like Lev she visited Tatyana in Berlin during the 1920s, but at some point in the 1930s Tatyana lost contact with her completely. She died of TB after the war.

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Asya

Adela (Dusya) (1899–c.1998) followed her parents to Vienna and then to Poland where she married the farm manager on her parents’ estate, Olis Ukrainski, and remained in Poland for the rest of her life. She was close to her brother Alexander and received several visits from him before and after the Second World War. After the war she joined the Communist Party, trained in agriculture and became director of a state farm. She lived to nearly 100. She had a daughter Irina and a son Yurii, who joined the resistance as a teenager and later trained at military academies in East Germany and in Moscow.

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Alexander and Adela in Poland 1939

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Adela during an interview for Julie Bertuccelli’s film, c.1995

Victor (Vila) (1907–c.1944) accompanied his parents to Vienna and to Poland. Later he lived for a time with his mother in Belgium, to which she had moved following Savelii’s return to Russia. He also spent periods with Tatyana in Berlin. He moved to France in 1929, a little earlier than Alexander and Tatyana. Once in France his life became closely bound up with Alexander’s. They trained in the same seminary, though Viktor did not complete the course. Viktor worked closely with his brother during the war, managing one of the homes that Alexander had set up to house refugees. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned and deported, and was not heard of again.

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Victor

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Family tree

1Roger Millot, ‘Les Glasberg, une famille juive ukrainienne’ in Alexandre Glasberg 1902 – 1981. Prêtre, Résistant, Militant (2013). This account includes information from archival documents provided by Schlomo Wilhelm, rabbi of Zhitomir, and from Alexander Glasberg’s naturalisation file, investigated by Christian Sorrel (see chapter 10 ).

2Nick Lampert, Connecting with Family History. Ukraine 24 May – 1 June 2008. A diary in words and images (2010).

3The territories which came to be known as the Pale of Settlement included Imperial Russian provinces in what is today Poland, Lithuania and Belarus, and all the provinces of Dnieper Ukraine (provinces in eastern and western Ukraine, on the Right and Left Banks of the River Dnieper). The aim of the Imperial government was that Jews be prevented, with certain exceptions, from moving further east, that they remain on territories acquired from the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Paul Magocsi, A History of Ukraine 2nd ed. 2010, ch 28.

4From 1897 Census of Russian empire, summarised in https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Волынская_губерния (In Russian).

5The main agricultural products in Volynia included wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, millet, peas, potatoes, sugar beet, tobacco, hops, and fruit in the south (including peaches, apricots, grapes); animal husbandry and beekeeping were also important, while industrial production, mainly small-scale, included sugar, tobacco, water and steam-driven flour mills, forestry and sawmills, and distilling. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Волынская_губерния (In Russian).

6Paul Magocsi, A History of Ukraine 2nd ed. 2010, ch 27.

7The former Orzhevskii mansion is now a technical college, still impressive from the outside, standing in an attractive wooded garden, with a small but imposing family church.

8A villager told me that Glasberg had built a 20-room house for his workers, and showed me the plot where the house once stood, close to the river which forms the border between the provinces of Zhitomir and Khmelnitskii.

9During my visit to Novaya Chertoriya in 2008 I was introduced to an elderly couple Tamasii and Evdokiya; it was Tamasii who told me in confidential tones that the fire at the Glasberg mill was not accidental!

10 The contract was drawn up by Erasmus Stepanovich Prshemenskiz.

11 In 2008 a villager showed me the place where a Jewish prayer house once stood. I asked about the Jewish population in the village in the old days. I was told that there had been many Jewish families, ‘280 homesteads’ ( dvory ) before the war. Today the village comprises 700–800 homesteads, so possibly half the prewar population was Jewish.

12 Registered on 25 April 1902 no.170; circumcised on 4 May 1902.

13 Lazare reports that Alexander Glasberg confided to a member of staff at the Centre d’orientation sociale that he had loved his grandmother ‘infinitely’. He would say: ‘Everything I know about Judaism, I owe to my grandmother.’ Lazare, L’Abbé Glasberg , pp 25–26.

14 The letter was supplied to Roger Millot by the rabbi of Zhitomir Shlomo Wilhel.

15 Paul Magocsi, A History of Ukraine 2nd ed. 2010, chs 28 and 40.

16 In Alexander’s application for French citizenship in 1935 he mentioned that in 1923 he had been declared unfit for military service in Poland because of poor eyesight. Archives nationales AN, 19770888/196, dossier de naturalisation d’Alexandre Glasberg (4931/36), notice de renseignements etablie par la prefecture de l’Allier, 18 octobre 1935. Cited by Sorrel in Alexandre Glasberg 1902–1981 , p 26. Hence it is safe to assume that by then the family had left Vienna and were resident in Poland.

17 Military leaders tried and executed in 1948 under Bierut included General Stanislaw Tatar and Brig-General Emil August Fieldorf, 40 members of the Freedom and Independence organisation, together with a number of church officials, and many other opponents of the new regime including the ‘hero of Auschwitz’, Witold Pilecki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki

Chapter 2

SETTLING IN FRANCE AND BECOMING A PRIEST

The account below relies very largely on research by Christian Sorrel, which has thrown important light on the religious path taken by both Alexander and Victor Glasberg. Most of the footnotes, with altered numbering, are taken from Sorrel’s work.¹ In certain places I have added material, and in this case the relevant notes are placed in square brackets in order to distinguish them from those of Christian Sorrel.

Alexander Glasberg arrives in France

After more than a decade of unsettled existence in Vienna, Poland, Germany and Yugoslavia, Alexander Glasberg arrived in Paris from Belgrade in April 1932.² His older sister Tatyana also moved to France around this time, from Berlin, while his younger brother Victor had arrived earlier, from Belgium, in October 1929.³

It was now that Alexander embarked on the path that would lead to ordination in the Catholic church. His religious quest had begun in the 1920s, before he came to France. The details are not clear, but a recent investigation by Christian Sorrel has established that he first became a Lutheran, and later a Catholic.⁴ Victor, influenced by Alexander, followed a similar trajectory. Victor reported that in February 1930 he was baptised ‘conditionally’ at the Catholic church of Saint-Ludwig in Berlin-Wilmersdorf,⁵ which means that he had been baptised earlier, but for some reason the church authority had doubts about its validity. Victor reported that his conversion was due to the influence of his brother, whom he had ‘resisted for a long time’, and to the influence of his older sister.⁶ This strongly suggests that Alexander’s conversion to Catholicism came earlier, at some point during the 1920s.

The role of Elizabeth Belenson

After arriving in Paris Alexander was in communication with a number of people who encouraged his and Victor’s religious journey. The most important of these was Elizabeth Belenson, a Russian Jew from Ukraine who had converted to Catholicism, and who was described as a ‘second mother to the Glasberg brothers’.⁷ She was very preoccupied with Judeo-Christian understanding, and convened a discussion group in the mid-1930s which included a number of exceptional thinkers, among them Edmond Fleg, Louis Massignon and Jules Monchanin.⁸ Monchanin was a Lyon-based Benedictine monk and priest who would spend the latter part of his life in India as a devotee of Hindu-Christian dialogue. He was also a strong advocate of Judeo-Christian bridge-building, emphasising the Jewish roots of the Christian faith. He became friendly with the Glasberg brothers while they were training for the priesthood in Lyon (see below) and it was through them that Monchanin was introduced to Belenson.⁹

How Alexander Glasberg first came to know Elizabeth Belenson is not clear, but she hosted him when he arrived in Paris, in her home in Rue Bonaparte, where he stayed until the end of September 1933, before moving into a modest hotel in the 15th arrondisement.¹⁰

There was gossip at the time about Alexander’s relationship with Elizabeth Belenson, which remained alive in my family, to the effect that they were lovers. This found its way into a report by French General Intelligence in 1949, when Alexander was applying for French citizenship: ‘We must note that, during his first stay in the capital, Glasberg was cohabiting with Mme Schwarzwald, divorcee Belenson, … a Russian refugee and woman of letters.’¹¹ It is quite possible that the story is true, but it has to be said that neither family talk nor French General Intelligence are reliable sources on this matter, so we shall probably never know.

A Catholic education

In 1932 Alexander joined the Institut Catholique,¹² and in January 1933 enrolled on a course in philosophy. In June 1933 he was ‘conditionally’ baptised at the Solitude d’Issy.¹³ Thus it seems that, as with Victor, there was doubt about the validity of the earlier baptism. At the Institut Catholique Alexander met Georges Tzebrikov, a former Orthodox priest who had joined the Eastern Catholic Church and was teaching at the Institute.¹⁴ Tzebrikov entrusted Alexander to the spiritual direction of Father Jules Lebreton, a theologian and professor at the Institute, who supported him in the search for a seminary in which to train, bearing in mind that Alexander had no funds. Alexander hoped to enrol in the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineaux (a Paris suburb) in the autumn of 1933 and was recommended by Father Lebreton. It was agreed that the Paris diocese would fund his board, should he be accepted there. However, the directors required an observation period of one year. Father Lebreton commented:

‘I understand why a trial is imposed on a convert, but I fear that it will be hard to bear, and perhaps do more harm than good …. I still do not know how he is going to support himself. The very precarious conditions of life in a small hotel are hardly conducive to the preparation which he wishes to pursue.’¹⁵

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Père Jules Lebreton (1873–1956)

Alexander then turned to the seminary of Moulins (capital of the department of Allier), run by the Marist Fathers.¹⁶ He had met the superior of the Moulins seminary during the summer, at the Trappist monastery of Sept-Fons: in order to supplement his income, he spent three months (July to September 1933) helping with hospitality at the monastery, and had developed a friendly relationship with the abbot, Dom Chautard.¹⁷

Alexander wrote to the Moulins seminary in October 1933: ‘Not wishing to lose a year, I would be happy to enter your seminary and I would be grateful if you could give me some information on this subject … There is a difficulty, which is financial: since I am without means, it is quite impossible for me to pay for my studies.’¹⁸

Father Lebreton again supported his application:

‘M. Glasberg was born into Judaism, and after passing through Lutheranism he converted to Catholicism and aspires to the priesthood. He seems to me courageous and sincere … If you could receive him, this would be a great blessing and a source of security. I hope that that he will make the effort to be worthy of such a favour. He will be much better able than if he stays in Paris, to respond to a vocation which I think is real but which needs to mature.’¹⁹

The diocese was faced with a serious crisis in recruitment to the priesthood, and the bishop of Moulins Monsignor Gonon quickly agreed. The superior of the Moulins seminary wrote to Alexander: ‘You will be received free of charge if you sign a commitment to carry out your ministry in this diocese when you enter the priesthood.’²⁰ Alexander enrolled on 2 January 1934 and on 1 May was joined by Victor, who had been recommended by Dom Chautard. The Abbot of Sept-Fons wondered however about Victor’s capacity to keep vows of chastity, here resorting to stereotypes that were typical of the period: ‘I admired, in Ireland, the extent to which the majority of Celts were able readily to maintain their chastity. On the other hand, it is quite otherwise for the race to which Victor belongs, as even great converts have confessed.’²¹

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Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard OCSO (1858–1935), abbot of the Abbey of Sept-Fons

In autumn 1934 the two brothers embarked on a study of theology, with the obligation to do some supplementary courses to fill the gaps in their knowledge.²²

Their results were good, especially Alexander’s, who was considered ‘intelligent’, and ‘good’ in piety, conduct and character, though he ‘could work harder’ and was ‘mediocre’ in the domain of ceremony. Victor was judged weaker, both in academic results and in character (‘needs to study’) and conduct (‘too many visits’), but was thought ‘intelligent’ and ‘good’ in piety.²³

The brothers stayed at the Moulins seminary for only a year and a half, then continued their studies at the University Seminary of Lyon in