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Rabbi Shmuel Azimov, one of the leaders of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hassidic movement in France, has died. He was 69.

Azimov, a native of the former Soviet Union, died on Nov. 5 from an illness that required hospitalization. His body was brought from Paris to Israel for burial on the same day.

“Despite his eminence, this was a man who spoke to his juniors, to everyone, as equals,” said Rabbi Avraham Weill of Toulouse. “And though he never sought the limelight, he was the driving force behind the educational revolution of the Chabad movement in France. He wasn’t just a spiritual father to thousands of Jews but an actual second father to many of them.”

Chabad-Lubavitch has 115 centers in 95 cities in France, which the movement’s website, Chabad.org, called “the direct result of his work.” The centers are staffed by more than 450 emissaries.

Azimov studied in the Central Chabad Yeshivah in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he became deeply connected to Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe. In 1968, Schneerson sent Azimov and his late wife, Bassie, to Paris to serve as his emissaries there.

The couple’s three children are Chabad emissaries in the French capital. — jta