Gisèle Lustiger

Charles and Gisèle Lustiger, were Ashkenazi Jews from Będzin, Poland, and ran a hosiery shop. He and his wife left Poland around World War I. Source

Mother of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustigerl

Karol ( Charles ) Lustiger - Cardinal father moved from Bedzin to Magdeburg , and then Paris. There, in 1925 . Married Gisela ( Gisèle ) of the house Lustiger , the daughter of a widowed Będzin rabbi. Source

Charles and Giselle Lustiger, kept a hat shop in Montmartre. As emigrants from Poland, they had started selling goods from a street stall before prospering and taking French citizenship. Although the children's grandfather had been a rabbi, they were given no religious instruction and had a secular upbringing.

The family spoke French at home, but the parents spoke Yiddish if they did not wish their children to understand. The Lustigers moved to an apartment in the 5th arrondissement, and Aaron attended the Lycée Montaigne, where he showed great ability in literature and languages.

In 1937 he was sent to stay in Germany with an anti-Nazi Protestant family whose son was in the Hitler Youth. Thinking that their visitor was a Gentile, the boy showed Lustiger a dagger, confiding that the Hitler Youth intended to kill "all the Jews in Germany during the summer solstice".

When young, Lustiger wanted to become a doctor. He later described himself as "a proud child with a difficult personality". His mother forbade him to read comics and his father would not let him leave the house during Christian festivals. But the boy read the Bible secretly, and later said that he had the impression that he was "reading something he already knew".

On the outbreak of war in 1939 the family left Paris, hoping to find a refuge in Orléans. During Holy Week in 1940 Aaron Lustiger disobeyed his father's instructions, and for the first time visited a church (Orléans cathedral), feeling a strong attraction to the empty building.

On returning the following day, Good Friday, he decided to convert. He was instructed by the Bishop of Orléans and baptised as Aaron Jean-Marie. His parents reluctantly consented to his conversion, believing that it was a sensible precaution to take in 1941.

Leaving his children in Orléans, Lustiger's father moved to the Unoccupied Zone while his mother returned to Paris to run the shop. When the round-ups of Parisian Jews started in 1942, Giselle Lustiger was denounced by the family maid, who wanted to take over the apartment.

Lustiger became a Catholic at 14 during the early days of the German Occupation, and lost his mother two years later when she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. He saw his conversion as a natural progression, believing that Christianity and Judaism were "indissolubly linked" and that "the New Testament was hidden within the Old and the Old Testament came to light in the New", since Christ was the Messiah of Israel.

The Bishop of Orléans arranged for Jean-Marie to live at a seminary outside Paris, where he passed his baccalauréat. Later he rejoined his father and sister in the south of France, where the family remained in hiding until the Liberation.

After the war Lustiger's father, assisted by the Chief Rabbi of Paris, tried to get his son's baptism annulled on the ground that Aaron had converted for empirical reasons, an argument that Jean-Marie strongly denied. Lustiger entered the Sorbonne University, where he decided to become a priest, a decision that caused a complete rift with his father. In the seminary Lustiger was later remembered as a stubborn and insubordinate student. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1559620/Cardinal-Lustige...]