Judith Hemmendinger (née Feist, 2 October 1923 – 24 March 2024) was a German-born Israeli researcher and author who specialised in child survivors of the Holocaust.

During World War II, she was a social worker and refugee counselor for the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), a French Jewish children's aid organization based in Geneva, and from 1945 to 1947, she directed a home for child survivors of Buchenwald in France.

[1] The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 found the Feists on their annual summer vacation in Megève, southern France.

[1] She developed a relationship with one of the students, Claude Hemmendinger, but in September 1943, her mother called her to accompany her and her younger siblings on an escape to Switzerland, following her father's arrest.

She applied for a six-month course being offered by the OSE to train social workers "to deal with the post-war situation", and was accepted.

[1] As part of her job, she interviewed child refugees traveling under false papers to find out their true identities, with the goal of re-uniting them with their families after the war.

She traveled to the Chateau d'Ambloy in Loir-et-Cher, France, where a home had been set up for 90 to 100 teenage boys from Orthodox homes who had requested kosher facilities and a higher level of religious observance than that being provided to the larger group of Buchenwald child survivors in France.

[1] She stayed with the home on its move to the Chateau de Vaucelles in Taverny in October 1945, and remained as its director until September 1947, when the last child had found a permanent placement.

[5][7] Explaining her success with the boys, who had displayed extreme trauma and anxieties upon their arrival in France,[8] she said: "I loved them, I never judged them, I became attached to them, and I felt that it was reciprocal".

At first, they settled on a kibbutz in Beit She'an, Israel, but returned to Claude's mother's home in Strasbourg after the death of his father.