Alexander Glasberg: a polyglot Jewish émigré from Ukraine who settled in France in 1932 and became a Catholic priest. He saved many Jews from deportation to Auschwitz during the Vichy period. He escaped the clutches of the Gestapo in Lyon in 1942, taking an assumed name in a parish in south-west France, and joined the Resistance.

After the war he set up an organisation which provided a unique combination of services for refugees, for the elderly and for the disabled, inspired by a radical approach to social work. Forty years after his death in 1981, the COS Alexander Glasberg Foundation preserves that tradition.  

Abbé Glasberg was a free spirit, impossible to categorise: a priest outside the Church, a Francophile yet passionate defender of refugees, a Zionist yet strong defender of the Palestinian people, a very sociable yet very private man.