After Auschwitz was liberated, Myriam took her toddler son and traveled by train across Europe.

“When she came to Paris, she stepped off the train and said to herself, ‘This is where I want to live,’ although I don’t know why she specifically chose that location,” Reb Efraim says.

It must have been a terrifying world for a young Jewish woman with no family at all other than her infant son, but Myriam turned her face to the future, and when she met a refined Jewish refugee from Berlin, she remarried. For little Francois, the kindly and intellectual Moshe Wasservogel was the only father he ever knew. Until he was much older, Francois didn’t even know that his mother’s husband was his stepfather, and that his birth father had been killed in the Holocaust.

Although his mother continued to speak to him in Polish and his parents spoke German between themselves, Francois was a typical French schoolboy, and he distinguished himself with excellence in his studies. People knew the Wasservogels were Jewish, but during the 1950s, he says, the collective French guilt about the Holocaust meant that he never felt anti-Semitism at school or university. At home, though, while there was culture and education and music, and even a new little brother to play with, there were no religious traditions. Being born in Auschwitz meant he’d never had a bris milah, nor did he even know what a bar mitzvah was.

He was 15 when his met a Jewish girl who would become his wife five years later, and with whom he’s lived happily for the next 62 years. “My wife, Batia — it’s all in her name. You know what Batia means: daughter of G-d. She would bring spirituality into my life… but not quite yet.”

As a young mathematician finishing up two doctorates at the University of Paris, one in mathematics and the other in economics, his first job offer was a United Nations-sponsored post in Venezuela.

“I had two roles, although I spoke no Spanish at the time,” he recalls. “To teach Mathematics at the University of Caracas and to liaise with the Venezuelan Ministry of Agriculture to evaluate their spectacular forests by measuring and cataloguing the trees.”

Batia, a geographer and urbanist, worked alongside him. The position also involved a monthly visit to give a report at the United Nations headquarters in New York. And it was on one of these monthly visits that Francois encountered the CEO of Renault, a meeting that would eventually propel him to the summit of his career.

Overdrive

“I

was at the UN headquarters in New York in 1966 when someone told me that some French guy was giving a lecture in one of the UN’s lecture rooms,” Reb Efraim relates. “I went in and there speaking was Pierre Dreyfus, the chairman of Renault, France’s nationalized automobile company. I was only 23, but I was a little chutzpahdig, so at the end of the lecture I went over and told him that it was great to hear a speech in my native French.”

Pierre Dreyfus, a top industrialist and civil servant who had built the French company into one of Europe’s leading car manufacturers, and also a Jew, saw something in the young man.

His response was an utter surprise. “When you return to France, come and visit me,” he told Francois.

A year later, Francois and Batia headed back to Paris to welcome their firstborn daughter into the world, deciding not to renew their UN Venezuelan contracts. Francois got into his old car and headed to the Renault headquarters, intending to take Dreyfus up on his offer. After getting past the security guard and into the impressive office building, he was just being politely turned away by the secretary when the CEO himself entered and recognized him.

Dreyfus was welcoming but abrupt. “Come. I have just one minute for you. You see this small room? It’s your office. There’s a pile of documents on the desk. Sit there and go through them, take a pen and comment.”

His contract and salary were agreed and signed that same day, and for the next three months Francois analyzed marketing and industrial data in his office next to the CEO, offering his input to Dreyfus in daily meetings Then he asked the boss if he could get closer to the cars. Dreyfus considered, and responded that the company was lacking a product division. “As of today,” he told Wasservogel, “you are the director of product engineering and development.”

It was in this role that Wasservogel soared. By the time he left Renault ten years later, he was the director of 800 people in the product planning division, and his name is still associated with one of Europe’s best-selling cars, the Renault 5, which he’s credited with having conceived, designed, and developed.

Launched in 1972, this practical two-door hatchback took the French market by storm.

“I told the engineers I wanted them to create a ‘real small car,’ not a ‘small real car’ — a car that was genetically small, not just a smaller version of the Renault 4. Not everyone was on board with my insistence that we create a two-door hatchback, and at the board meeting, Dreyfus asked how long it would take to know if I was right or wrong. I said, ‘six months,’ but that was a big mistake. Actually, we knew within 24 hours of the launch. There was such a feeling in the industry. The production line was capable of producing 2,000 cars per day, and daily demand quickly reached 4,000. Customers had to wait six months to get their car.”

The Renault 5 was the best-selling car in France from 1972 until 1986, with a total production exceeding 5.5 million over 14 years. It was the most popular car in Europe in 1979, and spawned famous sporting versions such as the Renault 5 Turbo, which won first place at the Monte Carlo Rally in 1981. (The modern, electric version of the Renault 5 is still leaving its competitors in the dust today, making off with the 2025 European Car of the Year award.)

Wasservogel even wrote a book which gives a philosophical twist to the role of cars in modern life (L’Auto Immobile) and remained at Renault until his boss and mentor, Pierre Dreyfus, retired in 1977. (Dreyfus went into politics and served the country as Minister of Industry.) Wasservogel was on the short list of five candidates to replace Dreyfus at the top, but when another candidate became CEO, he says that “the successor didn’t like me, and although I was happy to work under someone, I couldn’t afford to work with a man who made me unhappy.”

New Beginnings

F

rancois was quickly hired again. His next job was at the giant American research and development company Battelle, based in that beautiful Swiss city on France’s border, Geneva, although he says it was “the most boring city in the world” to live in. But it was there that Batia met some practicing Jews and began to encounter the beauty of their Jewish heritage, which would eventually turn their lives inside out. Slowly, she introduced tradition into their home, including buying kosher meat and two new sets of dishes.

In the 1980s, the French government moved to unite the French steel industry into a single company, Usinor-Sacilor. The CEO, Francis Mer, invited Francois Wasservogel to become Number Two of this giant enterprise.

“I guess I had ‘industrialist’ written on my forehead by then,” he says — and the family gratefully moved back to Paris. By now a father of two children, Francois remained director of automotive development at Usinor-Sacilor for around ten years, helping to establish the company as a significant player in the automotive industry, eventually becoming the second biggest supplier of steel to the automotive industry worldwide.

It was then that something started happening within the family. Sophie, the Wasservogels’ oldest daughter, attended an Arachim lecture during university studies in Paris and was impressed by what she discovered: that the Jewish religion was alive, well, and deeply meaningful.

Sophie soon made aliyah, but not before introducing her family to Arachim and to Torah. Once this intellectual couple began to learn, they realized just how much they were missing. With an enviable career and two doctorates in hand, when it came to Judaism, “I knew nothing,” Efraim says flatly. “I had to learn everything. I had to undergo milah.”

Yet Dr. Wasservogel admits that it was neither religious nor Zionist motivations that brought him to the Holy Land, nor the contemporary malaise of French anti-Semitism. It was mainly making his wife happy.

“Batia was actually born in Eretz Yisrael. Her father was originally Polish, but he moved to Palestine in the 1930s. The family later relocated to France, but Batia harbored a longstanding dream to return.”

Around this time, Dr. Wasservogel’s mother, Myriam, passed away. Before her petirah, she handed him an old photograph of a man in his thirties, and a sefer Tehillim.

“There was no need for genetic testing. It was clear this man was my father,” he says. (Much later, in Israel, he would learn more about the Tzimmer family and would actually meet a first cousin — until then, he didn’t know of any surviving relatives.)

After his mother died, the Wasservogels began to prepare for aliyah. Always conscientious and thought-out, Dr. Wasservogel waited until he had secured a position, this time as an industrial advisor to Bank Hapoalim, responsible for loans granted to local and foreign investors. He and Batia finally made the move in 1996.

Meeting with the Boss

“WE

had friends who had moved to Raanana and told us it was Gan Eden, so we followed them there,” Reb Efraim recalls. “Within a few months I felt at home, as if it was a suburb of Paris.”

The neighbors in the Wasservogels’ apartment building were shomer Shabbos, and Reb Efraim was soon going to shul together with them. He also connected with a group of avreichim who came regularly to teach Torah and tutor in the affluent Raanana neighborhood. Through these connections, he discovered French-speaking Rabbi Israel Cahen of Bnei Brak. Rabbi Cahen, a rosh kollel, is a son of Rabbi Gershon Cahen a”h, menahel of Aix les Bains yeshivah who kept Jewish education alive in the villages of the French Alsace region, and is a son-in-law of Rav Mordechai Miller a”h of Gateshead. Rabbi Cahen became not only a mentor to the Wasservogels, but also a dear friend.

“We actually made the move to Bnei Brak before we became ‘penguins,’” Dr. Wasservogel says, indicating his black and white yeshivish-style dress, “but when we were nevertheless religious enough to do so.”

Rabbi Cahen deeply admires the sincerity which brought his friend to the City of Torah. “It was parshas Bechukosai, and the Wasservogels, who still lived in Raanana, were invited to Bnei Brak for Shabbos,” Rabbi Cahen relates. “Reb Efraim learned the Rashi that explains the meaning of ‘Im bechukosai teileichu’ as ‘shetihyu ameilim baTorah — you should toil in Torah.’ He understood from that Rashi that Hashem wants us to live our lives and spend our time toiling in Torah. It hit home with him, and he picked up and moved his family to Bnei Brak in order to do that.”

When Rabbi Cahen moved his kollel to Kiryat Sefer, Reb Efraim drove there daily to join. “This is someone who is brilliant at the sciences, but was happy to be a beginner at Gemara, eager to learn, and mevatel himself to ask the simplest questions and get to the truth,” says Rabbi Cahen. “Efraim Wasservogel obligates us all with his uncompromising yiras Shamayim and simple, kavod-free quest for Torah and truth.”

The man who found serene, scenic Geneva boring doesn’t mind at all the noise and frenetic pace of life in the chareidi city, which often seems to be awake 24/6. Having left full-time employment so that he can be free to learn, he is in demand for high-level consulting work as a special advisor to companies like Israel Aerospace Industries, Israeli defense technology manufacturer Elbit Systems, and automotive companies. (He was eventually contacted again by Renault to become a project manager when the French automotive giant partnered with the startup Better Place to produce electric cars, but he declined the offer because he didn’t believe in the project’s feasibility. In the end, he was right. Better Place eventually filed for bankruptcy.)

The Wasservogels often spend Shabbos, Yom Tov, and vacations in their apartment above their son’s home in Kfar Adumim, looking out on the stunning sands of the Judean Desert, and on clear days, all the way to the Dead Sea. The man who is utterly understated about his own dazzling career achievements brims with enthusiasm and pride as he speaks of his son’s musical prowess and his success in his niche business of creating high-end custom guitars.

With a home just 150 meters from the famed Lederman shul where Rav Chaim and Rebbetzin Batsheva Kanievsky regularly davened, Dr. Wasservogel took advantage of opportunities to observe Rav Chaim ztz”l, and got some lifesaving answers when he went to the gadol with personal questions. For example, Rav Chaim stated “Hakol yihyeh beseder,” when Reb Efraim’s daughter was having pregnancy complications that made the doctors push for a termination; indeed, she gave birth to a healthy baby.

Even as his life has changed so dramatically, Dr. Wasservogel says he can’t change his affinity for cars, and so he continues to analyze, to evaluate, and to invent, now focused on something that will replace car batteries to improve performance and the environmental impact of automobiles. As CEO of the Bright Way Vision company, which creates automotive vision solutions, he’s now working on a system that utilizes Elbit technology to improve night vision for drivers and prevent road accidents.

During his time at Bank Hapoalim, Reb Efraim once represented the bank in dealing with an Italian investor who came prepared to invest billions of shekels in Israel. The investor was in Tel Aviv for a week, yet each afternoon, Efraim would leave work at 4 p.m. for his learning sessions. At the end of the week, as they were about to sign the deal in front of clicking media cameras, the Italian announced that he was pulling out due to insult.

“You left at four each day. We had no dinner together, no evening. I’m sure you were negotiating with competitors at the same time!” Reb Efraim said to him, “Don’t you want to ask who the competitor is? I was in meetings with G-d. Each and every day I left work to study the Bible.” The man, a Catholic, became emotional and walked back his refusal. The contract was signed, and the politicians, bank CEO, and journalists present took a deep breath of relief.

But this is really the arc of his life. After decades in the fast lane steering Europe’s best-selling cars and managing groundbreaking investments, Dr. Efraim Wasservogel isn’t embarrassed to let others know that the smoothest ride begins when you hand over the wheel for the ultimate destination.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1086)