Brief introduction to the foundation of the AIDLR
1. Its founder
Jean Nussbaum, a French physician of Swiss origin, founded the International Association for the Defense of Religious Liberty, abbreviated as A.I.D.L.R., in Paris, in 1946. His wish was to give a legal basis to the actions he had been taking on behalf of religious liberty, since the end of World War I.
Jean Nussbaum, the founder.
Jean Nussbaum was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, on November 24, 1888. He had a medical practice in Chamonix, France, when World War I broke out. Serbia, plagued by a strong outbreak of typhus from the very beginning of hostilities, made a desperate appeal to foreign countries to secure the help of physicians. Jean Nussbaum volunteered and was appointed to the hospital of Nis, Serbia, near the end of 1914. The management of the hospital gave him a young Serbian nurse, Milanka Zaritch, as an assistant and interpreter. Soon after their first meeting, she became the superintendent of the hospital.
They married in the fall of 1915. Milanka Zaritch was the niece of Voyislav Marinkovic, who later became the prime minister of the Serbian government. This family link soon introduced Dr Jean Nussbaum into the diplomatic and international circles.
While he was in Serbia, circumstances led Jean Nussbaum to an intervention with an officer of the Serbian army, to allow an Austrian prisoner of war, appointed to serve in the Nis hospital, to practice the principles of his faith. Out of lack of tact and narrow-mindedness, this prisoner had placed himself in a situation which might have cost him his life by refusing, as an enemy prisoner and in time of war, to obey orders. This event may have been instrumental in the awakening of the interest Jean Nussbaum was taking in the promotion and defense of liberty of conscience and religion for the rest of his life.
