French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Lustiger‘s death in a statement.

He passed away in a medical clinic where he was admitted in April.

Lustiger, whose Polish immigrant mother died in Auschwitz, had been made a prelate by the late pope John Paul II and served as archbishop of Paris for 24 years before stepping down in 2005.

He was born Aaron Lustiger in a Jewish Polish family living in Paris.

Fleeing persecution and misery, the family left the village of Bendzin in the Polish region of Silesia to Paris.

Lustiger’s grandfather, also named Aaron, was a rabbi and had lived in France from before the first World War. Lustiger’s parents ran a textile shop and the two children were given a Jewish identity.

Lustiger's mother Gisele ended up being deported and killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. For years, Lustiger's father Charles refused to accept his son's new faith.

It was then that the young Aaron discovered anti-Semitism, as explained through his parent’s accounts and literature. But he did not make any link between anti-Semitism and the Christian faith.

Due to the war and the nazi occupation, Lustiger’s family left Paris for Orleans in France’s free zone. It is there, at the age of 14, that Aaron decided to convert to Christianity.

This file photo taken 10 April 2005 shows cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger entering the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland during his visit with a group of French Catholics and Jews to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. AFP Copyright 2007

Lustiger’s mother was denunciated to the Nazis in 1942 by a neighbour and deported to Auschwitz where she died. Several members of his father’s family also died in the Holocaust.

But Lustiger never visited Auschwitz till 1983.

When he was baptized in August 1940, Lustiger kept his first name Aaron but added Jean and Marie.

Over the years Lustiger became a friend and confident of Pope John-Paul II.

He was appointed archbishop of Paris in 1981 and Cardinal in 1983. His name had even been cited as a possible successor to John Paul II.

Lustiger has always repeated that his Christianity didn’t mean that he renounced his Jewish identity and that he perceives “Jesus as Israel’s Messiah”.

When he became archbishop of Paris, he declared: "I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it."

He fell in opposition with the Jewish community which didn’t understand and accept his conversion.

It has been the subject of many discussions and quarrelling with his friend Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Despite this, he has played an important role in the dialogue between Christians and Jews. He was instrumental in efforts to find a solution to the problem of Polish Carmelites installed in the former concentration camp of Auschwitz.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his sadness at the cardinal's death, saying France had lost "a great figure of the spiritual, moral, intellectual and of course religious life of our country."

According to Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, the umbrella organization of French Jews and a specialist of relations with the French Catholic Church, Lustiger “was among those who have done the most for the relations between Catholics and Jews.”

Lustiger is one of the authors of the “repentant declaration” of the French Church leaders towards the Jews.

He accompanied Pope John Paul II in his visit to Jerusalem in 2000.

At the Pope’s special request, he represented and spoke in the name of the Vatican at the ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

He also was the first Cardinal to address a World Jewish Congress assembly meeting in Brussels.