Patrick Comerford
I spent an afternoon during our visit to Paris earlier this month walking around the Jewish district in Le Marais and strolled through the Rue des Rosiers, known affectionately in Yiddish as Pletzl or the ‘Little Place,’ and the surrounding streets, including Rue Pavée, with the Rue Pavée Synagogue, built as the Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue.
The smaller synagogues I visited included Fondation Roger Fleischman and the former Synagogue Beit Yossef on rue des Ecouffes in Paris, and I also visited some of the cafés and bookshops, the Holocaust Memorial, the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr and the Museum of Jewish Art and History.
At the beginning of World War II, about 270,000 to 300,000 Jews were living in France, and the Marais district in the 4th arrondissement had a large Jewish population. During the German occupation of France, an estimated 78,000 to 80,000 French Jews, including 11,000 children, were deported to the extermination camps. Most of the victims died in Auschwitz, Birkenau and other camps between 1942 and 1944; several thousand died in internment camps and 1,000 or more were executed or murdered in France. Only 2,500 survived deportation.
The Mémorial de la Shoah at 17 rue Geoffroy l’Asnier is the Holocaust museum and memorial in Paris. It is the largest and one of the most important centres in Europe for research, information and awareness on the history of the Jewish genocide during World War II.
The memorial was founded in 1956 and underwent a major renovation in 2005, creating exhibition spaces, a multimedia centre, and a reading room.
The present memorial and museum were opened by President Jacques Chirac on 27 January 2005. The day coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The façade of the building, above the forecourt, has two inscriptions. The first is an adaptation in Hebrew by the Russian-born poet Zalman Shnoeur (1887-1959) of Deuteronomy 25: 17: ‘Remember what Amalek did unto our generation, which exterminated 600 myriad bodies and souls even though there was no war.’
Shneour had moved to Paris in 1907 to study at the Sorbonne. He returned to Paris in 1923, but when Hitler’s troops invaded France in 1940 he fled to Spain and then New York and Israel. He died in New York in 1959.
The second inscription is a quote from Justin Godart (1871-1956), former Prime Minister and Honorary President of the Committee for the Unknown Jewish Martyr: ‘Before the unknown Jewish martyr, bow in respect and piety for all the martyrs; incline your thoughts to accompany them along their path of sorrow. They will lead you to the highest pinnacle of justice and truth.’
The forecourt includes a circular memorial listing the names of the death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto.
Seven bas-reliefs on a wall were created by Arbit Blatas (1908-1999) and symbolise the camps and the persecution of the Jews.
Blatas also created similar sculptures on a wall in the Ghetto in Venice commemorating the victims of the Holocaust.
Several walls forming a passageway list the names of about 76,000 French Jews who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. The names are listed alphabetically and by year of deportation.
The Mur des Names or Wall of Names is made of stone from Jerusalem. It was renovated in 2019-2020, allowing the addition of 175 since-discovered names, adding 1498 missing birth dates and correcting the spellings of hundreds of other names.
Deep in the building, the crypt is a sombre place, with the Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr, commemorating all six million Jews with no grave of their own.
This sacred memorial predates the Mémorial de la Shoah. In 1957, the ashes of victims from the different death camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Sobibor and Treblinka – and from the Warsaw Ghetto were placed in soil brough from Israel and buried together. These ashes and soil are entombed in a Star of David sculpted in black marble and pierced in the centre with an eternal flame.
On the wall at the back of the crypt, a Biblical quotation in Hebrew reads: ‘Look and see if there is any sorrow like mine. Young and old, our sons and daughters were cut down by the sword’ (see Lamentations 1: 12, 2: 21).
Facing the tomb is a door from Beaune-la-Rolande, an internment and transit camp in France for foreign-born Jewish men, women, and children.
The Jewish files are located in a small room near the crypt. They were created by the Vichy collaborating regime to identify Jewish citizens, and were later used by the Nazis to locate Jews for deportation.
The memorial’s permanent exhibits document the history of French Jews during the Holocaust. The materials on exhibit include photographs, text and video and audio recordings.
The memorial also includes an auditorium, bookstore, multimedia learning centre, documentation centre, and the Room of Names (research room).
The archival collections were started in 1943 during the Nazi occupation by Isaac Schneersohn. He had the foresight to preserve records that documented the persecution and murder of European Jews during the Holocaust.
Outside, on the corner with the street running down to the Pont Louis-Philippe and the River Seine, the Wall of the Righteous runs alongside the memorial.
Since 1963, the Yad Vashem Museum Memorial in Jerusalem has awarded the title ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ to non-Jewish people who helped save Jews during the war. The Wall of the Righteous in Paris lists 3,300 people, either French or acting in France, who have been awarded this recognition.
Today, France has the largest population of Jews after Israel and the US – an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 people – and most Jews in France, like most Muslims in France, are of North African origin. The number of antisemitic incidents in France almost quadrupled last year (2023), with more than 1,500 incidents, compare to 436 in 2022.
With the far-right on the rise across Europe and an increase in antisemitism around the world since 7 October, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris is an important reminder of the Holocaust and of the dangers of not challenging and speaking out against any expressions of antisemitism and racism.
Shabbat Shalom
The Eternal Flame in the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (Patrick Comerford, 2024)
