Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Madeleine Dreyfus studied Psychology with Sophie Lazarfeld, a student and disciple of Alfred Adler.

In October, 1941, Raymond Dreyfus lost his job in Paris because of the Vichy anti-Semitic laws.
The family moved into the unoccupied zone and settled in Lyon.

In August, 1942, when Jewish children were rounded up in the unoccupied south of France, Madeleine Dreyfus assumed responsibility for the Lyon/Le Chambon-sur-Lignon link in Lili-Elise Garel's network, and sought refuge in this mostly Protestant countryside for her Jewish children.
Madeleine Dreyfus accompanied small groups of children (aged anywhere from eighteen months to sixteen years) several times a month, taking the train from Lyon to Saint-Etienne, where she transferred to the local steam engine to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. The children had been given to her by their parents., or they had managed to escape at the time of their parents' arrest.
Iin almost all cases the children had false Aryan identity papers, but she did not.

On November 23, 1943, Madeleine Dreyfus learned that the Gestapo were planning to raid the the institution for deaf people in Villeurbanne.
She hurried to rescue a Jewish child staying there, but the Germans had preceded her and she was arrested.
At this time she was nursing her two-month-old daughter Annette.
She used a ruse to warn her family to flee their apartment and go into hiding immediately.

In May 1945, Madeleine Dreyfus was liberated from Bergen-Belsen.

In 1963, Madeleine Dreyfus was among the founders of l'Institut de formation et d’études psychosociologiques et pédagogiques (IFEPP).