The Women’s International Zionist Organization, or WIZO, is an international organization founded in 1918. It works to support women and children in Jewish society. It established a presence in Palestine, under the British Mandate, in 1924. During the Occupation, WIZO played a prominent role in France in the rescue of Jewish children.
Following the partition of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine came under British mandate in 1920. Jews who advocated for the creation of a Jewish national home and a return to the biblical land of Zion emigrated there. WIZO, founded in 1918 in the United Kingdom by five women, provided assistance to Jewish women and children in the new British Mandate of Palestine. In the years that followed, numerous WIZO branches were established around the world.
During World War II, WIZO—of which Juliette Stern was the French representative—was affiliated with the General Union of French Jews (UGIF), an organization controlled by the Germans.
Jewish children, facing certain death, were distributed among several UGIF centers in Paris. Juliette Stern began smuggling them out and hiding them with non-Jewish families or in anti-Nazi institutions. She secretly financed the operation using UGIF funds.
Juliette Stern managed to escape the Gestapo, which was quickly alerted, but many of her colleagues at WIZO were deported.
Nevertheless, with the help of numerous secular and religious institutions, local elected officials, the Secours National, the Red Cross, and others, WIZO succeeded in saving more than 1,000 Jews. It operated in the utmost secrecy thanks to Service 42B, better known by its code name SF, a clandestine unit within the UGIF.
WIZO is headquartered in Israel. Its stated goal is to promote a “civil society based on solidarity and education, centered on egalitarian and humanist values.”
Reference:
Lazare Lucien, 2001, The Jewish Resistance: A Struggle for Survival, Paris, Éditions du Nardi.
