Jacques Benbassat papers

Jacques Benbassat (1929-2010) was born in Vienna, Austria. His parents, Ella Feuerstein and Edouard Goldman, were Polish citizens who moved to Austria after World War I. They divorced in 1931. Ella Goldman remarried Albert Benbassat, a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who held Turkish citizenship, as his parents were born in Turkey. Benbassat was a banker and owned property in Vienna.

In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria during the Anschluss, the Benbassats left Vienna and went to Poland. Jacques Benbassat spent the 1938-1939 school year with his father before he joined his mother and stepfather in Romania, which was considered relatively safe by Albert Benbassat because the king was anti-Nazi. The Benbassats lived in Romania from 1939 until 1942, by which time Romania had joined the Axis powers and the family again felt threatened.

Albert Benbassat successfully bribed Romanian authorities to prevent the family's deportation, and he secured a family passport which allowed them to apply for visas to travel to Spain, then hopefully to the United States. In September 1942, as Spanish citizens, the family began traveling to Spain, moving from Romania to Venice, Italy, then Geneva, Switzerland. The family then planned to travel through France to reach Spain, but they were forced to remain in Geneva after the Germans took over southern France. They stayed in Geneva throughout the rest of the war and, in 1946, moved to Paris. In 1949, Jacques Benbassat emigrated to the United States with the assistance of his father, who was already an American citizen.