Izio Rosenman
Born in Dęblin, Poland, in 1935, he was deported as a child to Buchenwald. He came to France in 1945 with the “children of Buchenwald”, taken in by the OSE. He became a physicist at the CNRS, then a psychoanalyst. In 1989 he co-founded, with Albert Memmi, the Association for a Humanist and Secular Judaism, and has edited the journal Plurielles since 1993.
Physicist
Six months before finishing Supélec, Izio hoped to do research at the ENS with Alfred Kastler. The physicist — a future Nobel laureate — was interested, but Izio’s statelessness, as a Polish refugee, closed the door. Kastler redirected him to Pierre Aigrain, who was building a research group and hired him.
He began in 1959 at the LCIE — the Laboratoire Central des Industries Électriques — in Fontenay-aux-Roses, in a physics research group. There, in 1967, he defended a third-cycle thesis on the Shubnikov–de Haas effect and the band structure of Cd₃As₂. Once the thesis was complete, part of the laboratory moved to Jussieu; the others asked to follow, Aigrain agreed, and the whole lab relocated. Izio became a physicist at the Groupe de Physique des Solides.
A research director at the CNRS, he led a forty-year career there in solid-state physics — above all graphite intercalation compounds, then high-temperature superconductors, and finally soft matter. He worked notably with Jean Bok and supervised four doctoral theses (Laurent Legrand, Francisco Batallan, Christophe Gripon, Charles Simon).
Psychoanalyst
He began with a short analysis, which he left, then some ten years with Jean-Paul Pinel (SPP). He was supervised by Piera Aulagnier and Micheline Enriquez, of the Quatrième Groupe. He also earned a postgraduate degree (DEA) in clinical psychology, devoted to the theory of psychosis.
For nearly eight years he attended Piera Aulagnier’s seminar. He trained in psychoanalytic psychodrama with Jean Gillibert and Jean Chambon.
A psychoanalyst and child psychotherapist, he returned to the OSE — the institution that had taken him in as a child — as a board member, and ran psychoanalytic psychodrama sessions there.
Engaged intellectual
From 1953 to 1959 he attended the École Gilbert Bloch d’Orsay, where he met Manitou (Léon Askénazi), Henri and Liliane Atlan. As a student he was active in the UEJF, on the Paris board and then the national board.
In 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, he was part of the Committee of Intellectuals for a Negotiated Solution to the conflict, with Claude Lanzmann, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Yves Jouffa. In May 1968 he chaired the political-action committee at Jussieu; he took part in the Vietnam Committee.
In 1989 he co-founded the Association for a Humanist and Secular Judaism with Albert Memmi, Violette Atal Lefi and Anny Dayan-Rosenman. He has edited the journal Plurielles since 1993, and runs, with Anny, the “Livres des mondes juifs” book fair.
He has long defended a negotiated peace between two peoples and the recognition of a Palestinian state, within “Two Peoples, Two States” and then JCall, whose board he sits on with Anny, David Chemla, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy.
