By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA.org Jean-Claude Neymann runs the company started by his great-great-grandfather and now sells unleavened comestibles as far afield as China Neymann runs the oldest matzah bakery in France located in the town of Wasselonne near the German border traces its matzah-making tradition to 1850 “I’m the fifth generation of my family to bake matzah here in Wasselonne,” Neymann said Etablissements René Neymann is France’s oldest matzah bakery a city of nearly 6,000 people at the foot of the Vosges Mountains in northeastern France is like stepping into a Grimm’s fairy tale Timbered facades look more German than French a reminder that Alsace and Lorraine have been shunted back and forth between two countries that regularly warred with each other in the not-so- distant past a peddler and the father of this unleavened-bread dynasty set up his first bakery in nearby Odratzheim where he began to bake Passover matzah for his family and the local Jewish community and by 1870 he and his son Benoit moved the factory to larger quarters in Wasselonne a market city with an industrial district that also had the advantage of being the site of a flour mill Between 1870 and 1919 the Neymann family manufactured regular and shmura matzah in their factory changed the company name to Etablissements Rene Neymann and in 1930 began to market the wonders of unleavened bread to the non-Jewish public Jean-Claude Neymann runs the family matzah-making business the bakery was shuttered and the Neymann family was forced into exile in southern France Liberation came in November 1944 with the army of Gen and in 1948 Rene Neymann restarted the business The decades following World War II saw many changes in how people ate and shopped all over the world “Supermarkets started to replace traditional food markets and eating a low-fat diet became fashionable,” Jean-Claude Neymann noted seized the opportunities — he modernized and automated production expanded the product lines and secured new distribution outlets Etablissements Rene Neymann continued to extend its products and brands by manufacturing other types of matzah for different tastes and appetites: matzah made from rye and whole-wheat flours; bran matzah; spelt matzah; certified organic matzah under the supervision of the chief rabbi of Strasbourg Etablissements René Neymann also makes organic products “Regular matzah is still our biggest Passover item but about 62 percent of our total manufacturing output is sold outside France,” he said There’s a big market for crackers in those countries.” Asked about the state of French Jewry and mounting concerns about anti-Semitism in the country the proprietor of this storied French Jewish company was circumspect “We and our company are very well integrated into the life of Wasselonne and of France but in people’s minds we are always the Jew.” is the author of “The Complete Jewish Guide to France” and the forthcoming ebook “The Complete Jewish Guide to Paris.”) JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent I accept the Privacy Policy. Notifications can be managed in browser preferences. I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice Jean Samuel lived through and survived some of the very worst tortures of the Nazi Holocaust. Although he remained silent about his experiences for many years, he came to wider notice for his part in one of the very greatest works of testimonial writing to have come out of the Holocaust, Primo Levi's This is a Man. Born in 1922 in Wasselonne in the Franco-German border region of Alsace, Jean Samuel grew up in a close-knit Jewish family and community. His father ran the town pharmacy and Jean, too, would study pharmacology at university in Toulouse, after attending a lycée in Strasbourg. In his late career as an oral chronicler and educator about the Holocaust, Samuel was one of an heroic cohort of survivors, largely unsung and mostly now gone, who persisted through the post-war era and into old age in passing on to as many who would listen, above all the young, the terrible message from the concentration camps. One of Levi's biographers, Carole Angier, sets its significance very high indeed: "If one day there is a new Holocaust, and we can save only one chapter of one book from the twentieth-century, it should be this one: Chapter II of If This is a Man, 'The Canto of Ulysses'". Levi wrote "The Canto of Ulysses" back in his native Turin in 1945 – according to another biographer, Ian Thomson, in one lunch break – assuming Samuel was dead. When he discovered through another survivor, Charles Corneau, that Samuel, too, was still alive, he contacted him, sent him the draft chapter, and they exchanged a series of moving letters reflecting on their duty to remember, and the strange friendship that bound them together. They arranged to meet at the French-Italian border at Menton, but their papers were still in a mess, and so, somehow appropriately, these two young survivors struggling towards rebirth were allowed by officials to meet and talk in no-man's land, between their two countries, to get to know each other for the first time as "normal" human beings, and to reflect on how utterly changed they had been by what they had suffered. Their friendship would last until Levi's death in 1987; and it is no coincidence that Samuel's own work as a witness took off after his friend's death, as if he were taking on the duty to remember they had talked about in 1946, now that Levi could do longer do so. Jean Samuel, Holocaust survivor and pharmacist: born Wasselonne, Alsace, France 18 July 1922; married (two sons); died 5 September 2010. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies