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FROM THE PRESENTATION OF THE HUMANITARIAN AWARD TO Mme SIMONE VEILAuthor(s): Ruth CohenSource: European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Autumn 1996), p. 95Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41443382 .

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Ruth Cohen

FROM THE PRESENTATION OF THE HUMANITARIAN AWARD TO Mme SIMONE VEIL

Ruth Cohen*

It is my great honour to present the World Union's International Humanitarian award to Mme Simone Veil in recognition of the service she has given to her people and her country.

Simone Veil was born in Nice and, as a very young woman, was deported to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen and was not liberated until May 1945. Once repatriated she studied Law, becoming a Magistrate in 1956.

Having entered the Ministry of Justice in 1957 her career began in the Prison Division and led to her appointment as Secretary of Commissions studying diverse subjects including the reformation of the law on the confine- ment of the mentally ill and the problems connected with adoption.

Appointed in 1970 by the President of the Republic as Secretary of the Higher Council of Judges, Mme Veil continued to broaden her areas of inter- est still further as a member of the board of the governing body of French Radio and Television.

In the 1970s Simone Veil entered politics and served from 1974 to 1976 as Minister of Health, and then until 1979 as Minister of Health and Social Secu-

rity. In 1979 she was elected a Member of the European Parliament and served for three years as its President.

It is most fitting that this award be given to Mme Veil at this time when the world is offering thanksgiving for the end of the Nazi era fifty years ago, because her life has been an outstanding example of personal and intellectual courage.

In his book entitled Beyond Survival, Rabbi Dow Marmur says that 'as Jews we understand pain, our own and that of others' . Simone Veil's response to that knowl-

edge of pain - her own and that of others - has been through action and service. First as a magistrate, and later serving in the French and European Parlia-

ments, she has concerned herself in areas which touch the everyday life of every citizen. She has, in fact, concentrated on social action and social justice - the

paramount concerns of progressive Judaism in every continent of the world. On behalf of the one and a half million members of the World Union for

Progressive Judaism, it is my pleasure to present this Humanitarian Award to Simone Veil, an outstanding fellow-member of one of our own synagogues. We offer this award with our gratitude for the model she set for us all; for the

inspiration that she is to French Jewry; and for the example of Jewish leader-

ship that she shows to the nations of the world.

* Ruth Cohen is Vice-President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

EUROPEAN JUDAISM VOLUME 29 No. 2 SPRING '96 95

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