Rosalind Franklin volunteered to help Jewish refugees

Person: Rosalind Franklin
Lived: 1920–1958
Field: X-ray crystallography
From: British

The story

Rosalind Franklin grew up in a prominent Anglo-Jewish family with a strong tradition of public service. Her father, Ellis Franklin, was a merchant banker who taught evening classes at the Working Men's College in London, and her great-uncle Herbert Samuel had been the first practising Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. The women of the family were expected to put their education and talents into political, educational and charitable work for the community.

As Nazi persecution drove Jews from Germany and Austria in the late 1930s, the family responded. Her parents helped settle Jewish refugees in Britain, particularly children who arrived on the Kindertransport, the rescue operation that brought Jewish children from Nazi-ruled Europe to Britain. They took two refugee children into their own home. One of them, a nine-year-old girl from Austria named Evi Eisenstädter, shared a bedroom with Rosalind's younger sister Jenifer and remained close to the family as an adult. When Rosalind won a university scholarship in 1938, her father asked her to give the money to a deserving refugee student.

Rosalind followed the family tradition. She went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938 to study chemistry, and during her university vacations she worked with the German-Jewish Refugee Committee at Woburn House, the London headquarters of the major Anglo-Jewish organisations, helping people who had fled persecution to begin new lives. At Cambridge she also became close to Adrienne Weill, a French physicist and refugee who had studied with Marie Curie, and who became one of the most important influences on her life and career.

Franklin was not religious; she questioned belief in God from childhood and is best described as an agnostic. Yet she never abandoned her Jewish identity. As the only Jewish pupil at her boarding school she took Hebrew lessons on her own, she joined the Jewish Society in her first term at Cambridge, and she told her sister that she was always consciously a Jew.

She died in 1958, aged 37, and is buried in the Willesden Jewish cemetery in London. Her headstone gives her Hebrew name, Rachel bat Yehuda, and honours her research on viruses as being of lasting benefit to mankind. In 2024 a street in Netanya, Israel, was named for her as Rachel (Rosalind) Franklin.

Why it matters

The Franklin family's support for refugees was part of a wider effort by British Jews that helped thousands of people escape Nazi Europe and rebuild their lives.

About Rosalind Franklin

London-born Jewish chemist whose X-ray images of DNA, including Photograph 51, were crucial to the double helix; she also pioneered the structure of viruses and coal.

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Rosalind Franklin

1920–1958 · X-ray crystallography

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