Oil crayon on paper
Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Gift of Mordechai Allouche, Netanya
Felix Allouche (1901 - 1978)
Born in Sfax, Tunisia. Felix Allouche was a Zionist activist and a prominent Jewish journalist in Tunisia in the first half of the 20th century. In 1924, he founded the weekly, "Le Reveil Juif" in the city of Sfax. In 1932, he was appointed by Ze'ev Jabotinsky to serve as the leader of Beitar in Tunisia, and the following year, he represented Tunisia at the World Zionist Congress in Prague. With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Allouche became an anti-Nazi activist, voicing his opinions in the press and on the radio, and organizing demonstrations outside the German Embassy in Tunisia. When the Germans invaded Tunisia on 8 November 1942, he was arrested by Walter Rauf, head of an SD Einsatzkommando, and sent to forced labor in the vicinity of Bizerte and the port of El-Aouina. On his orders, his older children collected potentially incriminating documents pertaining to his anti-Nazi activities from the newspaper network where he worked. He was released in May 1943, and returned home broken physically and psychologically. After the war and the establishment of the State of Israel, he encouraged people to immigrate and build the Jewish State. He immigrated to Israel in 1956 and worked as a journalist, but never recaptured his former success. He passed away in 1978 and is buried in Tel Aviv.
