Synagogues and Jewish businesses in Paris; summer camp for children

The original Kodak film contains a 1934/54 date code [plus/circle] Robert Gessner published a book in 1936 about his overseas travels called "Some of my Best Friends Are Jews". On page 33, he writes: "Overnight from Paris is a summer camp for the children of French workers. Through the International Red Relief, an organization for the aid of political refugees, and the World Committee Against Fascist Oppression in Germany a number of German children have been quartered in the camp. It is on the Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle, a beautiful provincial island where the sun is healing and the tides roll. [...] They have divided their ranks into sections and each section carries the name and banner of a fighter against fascism, and they play their games under these banners." Gessner names three of these German refugee children, quartered at the camp amongst the children of French communists: Eric, a young German Jew who had been tormented by his Nazi teacher and whose entire family subsequently left the country; Kurt, whose mother was in a concentration camp and whose father was 'somewhere in the Saar'; and Karl, whose parents were both imprisoned by the Nazis for Communist politics and who had subsequently lived on the street with his younger brother and then in a German orphanage, where they were bullied and beaten by the Aryan orphans. They then escaped the orphanage. On pages 35-38, Gessner describes walking through the Marais, also known as the Pletzl, a Jewish neighborhood of Paris since 1881. Gessner relates an extended conversation he had with a Jew whom he calls Lloyd George II, after the English politician David Lloyd George, for his short stature and because he "was one of those typical ghetto politicians who are always 'fixing troubles.'" This is the man at 01:04:35. Gessner describes meeting him in a cafe in this neighborhood, and says that he, "folded his paper and pulled off his pince-nez."

The camp was originally founded as a Communist camp for the children of Parisian workers: "In the meantime, the city's Communist Oeuvre de Vacances Populaires Enfantines (OVPE) had built its own rural utopia amidst the fresh, pine-scented winds of the Charente-Maritime: 'The air of the colonie, filled with the scents of the sea and the woods, is absolutely pure and possesses all the qualities necessary to cure the little lungs of our kids, who, for the rest of the year, are forced to breathe the smoke from the factories of our industrial city.... We must insure the health [of our children] from infancy onward so that they may better resist the vicissitudes and evils which await all workers under the capitalist regime." (Page 6 of a book entitled "Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880-1960" by Laura Lee Downs.) In the mid-1920s, the camp was administered by Émile Dutilleul, a French Communist politician, member of the PCF (Parti Communiste Français), and parliamentary deputy.