L’affaire Finaly : une controverse religieuse ?

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The « Finaly affair » : A religious controversy ?In 1944, Robert and Gerald Finaly, two Jewish babies whose parents had been just arrested in the French city of Grenoble and deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis, were entrusted to Antoinette Brun, a public nursery director who hid them until the Liberation. At the end of the war, the family of the two brothers, living in New Zealand and Palestine, asked “Miss Brun” to hand them over. The woman refused, succeeded in obtaining legal authority over the boys, and then, in 1948, she had them baptized behind the back of their uncles and aunts, forcing the Catholic Church to enter the conflict. The so-called “Finaly affair” began.In 1952, a criminal adjudication ordered Miss Brun to return the children to their family, now living in Israel. But only an agreement between the French government, Church, and French Jewish organizations, completed under instense media pressure, succeeded in settling the conflict.Taking place several years after the Liberation and even though the Shoah was not really known as a specific phenomenon, the Finaly case seems to have mixed World War Two memories, the history of antisemitism, and religious anti-Judaism, before the newborn Israel state entered the conflict. For a long time only inter-preted as a religious controversy, this “affair” was probably rather more an ideological legacy of the 1930’s and 1940’s.