His father, Léon Helft, was an antique dealer whose store A la vieille Bretagne was well known.
[2][3][4][5] The Paris gallery was seized during the Second World War (with the complicity of the antique dealer Bonnefoy),[6] after Jacques Helft and his family left for New York in September 1940.
[7] He escaped France along with his family thanks to the intervention of the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes.
He was soon led to take an interest in French silverware of the Ancien Régime, a subject that was still very little studied at the time.
When Jacques Helft became an expert in silverware auctions, he wrote very precise catalogs reproducing the hallmarks, a rare thing at the time.