Paulette Fink

Paulette Weill Oppert Fink (1911 to 2005) was a French-Jewish nurse and resistance worker during the Second World War who later became a fundraiser for the new State of Israel. Born in Mulhouse on 22 October 1911 to a well-off Alsatian family, she studied at the Sorbonne and, when Germany invaded France in 1940, served as a Red Cross nurse on the front line. She and her first husband then joined the French Resistance in the village of Izieu, where they helped to save some 1,500 Jewish children left behind when their parents were deported. After the war she worked with the Jewish Brigade and the Joint Distribution Committee, helped refugees reach Palestine and founded eleven orphanages for child survivors of the Holocaust, the first at Malmaison near Paris. She travelled to the United States to raise funds, married Israel Fink in 1954, settled in Minneapolis, and from 1960 chaired the Women's Division of the United Jewish Appeal for three years. She died in Minneapolis on 2 April 2005.