The journey to Kuching, travelling all night, sleeping in snatches, and asking if this was all folly

The Sarawak State Legislative Assembly on the north bank of the Sarawak River … we arrived safely in Kuching after a 48-hour odyssey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter. – TS Eliot, Journey of the Magi

It’s not certainly not yet winter. But the journey was such a long journey at this time of the year. As Eliot might say, ‘A hard time we had of it.’

The journey from Stony Stratford to Kuching has been an arduous odyssey that took almost 48 hours from door-to-door and that involved two taxi trips, one train journey, four flights and five airports. Along the way there was one unscheduled hotel stay in Amsterdam but lost another planned stopover in Singapore, where we lost our hotel booking.

Our flights were booked through Air France and KLM and were supposed to involve a flight from Birmingham to Amsterdam late on Sunday, connecting immediately to a flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, arriving late on Monday afternoon, with a planned overnight stay in Singapore.

But I should have been aware of the red flags at the check-in process. Despite having booked in many weeks in advance, Air France/KLM told us the seats at the price we had booked were all gone, and demanded we pay extra to keep our booking on the flight from Amsterdam.

The queues for security at departures are still a nightmare at Birmingham International, and there is nothing pleasant about travelling from that airport these days. On the train from Milton Keynes, we received texts telling us our first flight was delayed by over an hour. We were not going to catch the second, connecting flight.

At Birmingham, we asked at check-in to be rebooked, and, it seems with great reluctance but with much waving of hands, we were eventually rebooked with an early morning flight from Amsterdam to Charles de Gaulle in Paris, connecting with a later morning, overnight flight from Paris to Singapore.

When we arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam gave us a voucher for €15 each for food and beverages in the airport, but refused pointedly to help us find overnight accommodation. I pointed out our rights, and was told my rights were irrelevant, it simply was not within their budget to pay for our hotel overnight.

We were caught over a barrel. Other passengers had been offered a room in the Sheraton, but we were too far down the queue to count for anyone to bother about our plight.

By then, there only three rooms were left in the Sheraton Hotel. We were told if we kept the receipts we might (there seemed to be an emphasis on Might) be able to claim back our outlay at a later stage. We made the booking and went back to the KLM help desk in the transit area. They had closed, and the staff had left.

Talk about being left high and dry. It is not as though KLM and Air France did not know about this problem. They had flagged it up early on Sunday afternoon. We were abandoned to our own devices. Our rights did not seem to matter and we were left feeling were a mere inconvenience.

Waiting in Paris for a flight to Singapore (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

We stayed overnight in Amsterdam, the vouchers we were given barely covered the cost of two breakfasts on Monday morning, and, yes, we managed to make the connecting flight from Paris to Singapore. But we had now lost our overnight hotel booking in Singapore, and a visit I had been looking forward to was no longer going to happen.

A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

The glass panels of the dome of the Jewel at Changi Airport in Singapore (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Six hours waiting in an airport is long enough to be bored, but not long enough to risk travelling into a city centre, look around and still get back in time for check-in for the next flight – particularly as our anxiety levels had been raised with the previous cancellations and rerouting.

Changi Airport is at the eastern end of Singapore and about 20 km from Singapore’s Downtown Core. So, we headed from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 at Changi Airport, to make sure we were still on the connecting flight to Kuching. And then decided to enjoy the few hours we had been the terminals.

Changi is one of the busiest transit hubs in the world and one of the largest hub airports in south-east Asia, serving over 100 airlines and more than 60 million passengers a year. Its impressive amenities include a butterfly garden, a free 24-hour cinema, and a rooftop swimming pool.

We decided to have lunch at Jewel Changi Airport, a nature-themed entertainment and shopping complex where the centrepiece is the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, the Rain Vortex, surrounded by a terraced forest setting. The Shiseido Forest Valley is an indoor garden spanning five storeys, and the Canopy Park at the top level has gardens and leisure facilities.

Jewel was officially opened on 18 October 2019 and has about 40 to 50 million visitors a year. The toroidal glass-and-steel façade was designed by a consortium of architects, led by Moshe Safdie. The landscape architect was PWP Landscape Architecture, who co-designed the National 9/11 Memorial in New York City. The Rain Vortex was engineered by the water design firm WET Design. It has a 360-degree light and sound show projected onto it.

Jewel was planned to combine a marketplace and an urban park. The glass panels of the dome are framed in steel that rests on a complex latticework.

The Shiseido Forest Valley is one of Asia's largest indoor gardens, spanning five stories and approximately 22,000 sq m in the heart of Jewel Changi Airport. It includes around 3,000 trees and 60,000 shrubs of 120 species that live in high-altitude tropical forests from around the world.

The Rain Vortex at Changi Airport is 40 metres high and the world’s largest and tallest indoor waterfall (Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The Rain Vortex is 40 metres high and the world’s largest and tallest indoor waterfall. Recirculating rain water is pumped to the roof to free fall through a round hole at up to 37,850 litres per minute to a basement-level pool. An acrylic funnel at the bottom prevents splashing and insulates the sound of the cascade.

The toroid-shaped roof has more than 9,000 pieces of glass spanning 200 by 150 metres, with a sloped oculus as the mouth of the waterfall acting as ‘a continuation of the building … completed in a liquid form.’

At night, the circular walls of the waterfall becomes a 360-degree stage for a light-and-sound show.

To prevent excess humidity in the Jewel, the waterfall’s flow alternates between cascades and trickles that reduce air turbulence. The Changi Airport Skytrain connecting the terminals passes above ground near the waterfall, allowing passengers to see the Vortex and Jewel.

The park includes a suspension bridge, the Canopy Bridge, 23 metres above the ground which offers a panoramic view of the Rain Vortex.

Terminal 4 opened seven years ago in 2017, and has gained a reputation for its culture-centric boutique design and technology-driven innovations. T4 offers a visually immersive and theatrical experience with specially curated art and entertainment features by local and international artists.

The collection of art and entertainment formats was designed to be accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. Inspired by the orchid, the national flower of Singapore, the interior design is shaped through symmetrical petal designs. The designs on the petal-shaped skylights, ceiling lights, marble flooring and carpets create a cohesive design language. The project is led by the SAA Architects Pte Ltd in collaboration with the award-winning UK-based international architecture firm Benoy Ltd.

The landscaping in the terminal covers 2,000 square metres, with 186 large trees, and 160 ficus trees form a ‘green’ boulevard along the boarding corridor, separating the boarding area from the common space at the departure gates.

‘Petalclouds’ is a kinetic artwork of six identical metallic in the Central Galleria in Terminal 4 at Changi Airport in Singapore (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The highlights of T4 include ‘Petalclouds’, a kinetic artwork of six identical metallic structures rotating overhead in the Central Galleria, spanning the 200 metre stretch linking T4’s public and transit areas.

The work is designed to evoke the impression of clouds moving through the sky. Each identical ‘cloud’ consists of 16 individual petal elements suspended on wires that slowly rotate the structures while transmitting power to lighting elements inside them. It was designed by the German artist collective ART+COM and undulates is in tandem with a soundtrack by the contemporary composer Ólafur Arnalds, aimed at creating a soothing antidote to pre-flight stress.

The Heritage Zone in the transit area offers a glimpse into the evolution of shophouse architecture from the 1880s to the 1950s, including the rich and colourful Peranakan heritage once often seen in Singapore’s Katong and Chinatown areas.

A row of boutique storefronts are designed to resemble the historic Peranakan shop-houses around Singapore. Each façade traces the evolution of shop-house architecture, starting with the baroque designs from 1880 to 1900, through to the post-war décor of the 1950s.

An LED screen embedded in the façade brings it to life with regular showings of Peranakan Love Story, a six-minute cultural theatre piece featuring an array of virtual characters that appear to mill about in the shop-house windows and living rooms. Narrating the story of an unlikely romance between two passionate musician-neighbours set in 1930s Singapore, the musical without dialogue is a collaboration with the Singaporean composer and artist Dick Lee.

The Heritage Zone in Terminal 4 at Changi Airport offers a glimpse into the evolution of shophouse architecture from the 1880s to the 1950s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024; click on image for full-screen viewing)

T4 is also home to three physical art sculptures depicting a common theme of travel or aviation. Chong Fah Cheng, a sculptor from Singapore, created ‘Hey Ah Chek!’ in the check-in hall. The artwork shows a mother and her son hailing a trishaw after a visit to the market.

The French artist Cedric Le Borgne has created ‘Les Oiseaux’ (‘The Birds’) in the arrival and departure halls. The three bird sculptures are made from a collection of 3D-wire luminous characters that metaphorically represent the different emotions one tends to feel at an airport.

I could identify with the ‘Travelling Family’ by Kurt Laurenz Metzler, one of the many sculptures and artworks in the Departure Transit area at Terminal 4. In these sculptures, the artist seeks to capture the feelings of excitement and energy he felt with his family as they transited through New York and later at Changi Airport. It is representative of the familiar emotions passengers feel when setting off from an airport to experience the world.

The ‘Travelling Family’ is a set of aluminium sculptures Metzler created in 2017. He shows the joys and tribulations of a family on a journey, their excitement and frenzy that always go with travel.

This is Metzler’s fourth public sculpture in Singapore. His previous works, including ‘Building People’ (2008) and ‘Man on the Bench’ (2010), at Capital Tower in the Central Business District, and ‘Urban People’ (2009), at Orchard Road, a bustling shopping district.

T4 has been designed to make the airport visit a delightful experience that is fun, vibrant and full of surprises. I almost regretted the call for boarding. But I was happy to make the flight to Kuching, and we have arrived safely after a marathon than turned into an odyssey.

The ‘Travelling Family’ by Kurt Laurenz in the Departure Transit area at Terminal 4 in Changi Airport in Singapore (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Making Christian mission disruptive and challenging the links between mission, violence and oppression

Professor Kelly Brown Douglas with the Revd Dr Duncan Dormor of USPG at the USPG conference in High Leigh this morning (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

Christian mission is disruptive and it must come alive, according to the Very Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas, when she challenged us today to rethink our paradigms of mission, and to think again about how the old models of mission were related to violence and oppression.

She was the keynote speaker this morning at the annual conference of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), with the theme of ‘United Beyond Borders’. She is a leader in womanist theology and racial reconciliation, the Dean of Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral.

Professor Brown Douglas asked us to think what just peace looks like. For her, forging a just peace means rethinking mission, and a shift from mission that is focussed on the conversion of individuals. In the past, mission has made victims of the recipients of mission that was part of colonialism, making them easy theological excuses for exploitation, often with racist aspects.

She linked the cultural and structural violence of imperialism and colonialism with the rise of white right Christian nationalism, and said the past model of mission was antithetical to building the kingdom and a world characterised by a just peace.

True mission is not about thrusting a particular culture and way of life on people, she said, but is about fostering the kingdom of God, the Missio Dei and a loving and just world that is characterised by a just peace.

Christian mission requires we listen to and understand the perspective of the victims of the conversion paradigm of mission and the violence that went with it. Violence breeds violence, she said, insisting violence is never initiated by the oppressed but is initiated by those who oppress.

We were challenged to think about how do we foster justice and the values that underpin justice and peace-making, the justice that God desires, and how do we live them out. This is the work of Christian mission, and it is not a project or event but a way of life, we were told. We heard that we are compelled to rethink mission and to create new models of mission that opens us to being just peacemakers in our world. ‘This is what spreading the good news of the Gospel is about … this is the work of Christian mission.’

The bell tower at the High Leigh Conference Centre in Hoddesdon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Bradon Muilenburg, the Anglican Refugee Support Lead in Northern France, was the keynote speaker this afternoon. He is originally from Michigan and has also worked with the Taizé community in France.

He spoke of his works along border lines and his day-to-day experiences in Calais. His work is supported by USPG, the Diocese of Canterbury and the Diocese in Europe.

He spoke of the distress of a family he heard about last night who were separated from their four-year-old child, and did not know whether the child was still alive or dead. ‘It cannot keep going on like this,’ he said. The child was found in a hospital in London this morning, but it is not always like this, and he spoke of two seven-year-old girls from Iraq who had drowned.

The reality is so different from the political rhetoric, he said. Too often people were spoken of as statistics. Referring to the language of reports in newspapers, he suggested we should not think that refugees are being dehumanised – it is we who are being dehumanised. We need to take fear away from the conversation, he said.

The refugees have experienced war, torture and injustice, they have been pushed back and teargassed at borders, yet they hold onto hope. People who have lost their own children have treated his child like their own family. ‘They shouldn’t have to face death again to be able to claim asylum.’

He spoke too of the work of Maria Skobtsova House, in the heart of Calais, offering sanctuary and hospitality to vulnerable refugees in the spirit of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Maria Skobtsova, ‘Saint Mary of Paris’.

He encouraged us to continue hoping and continuing our small efforts, and quoted the poem ‘Stubborn Ounces’ by Bonaro W Overstreet:

(To One Who Doubts the Worth of
Doing Anything If You Can’t Do Everything)

You say the little efforts that I make
will do no good: they never will prevail
to tip the hovering scale
where Justice hangs in balance.
I don’t think I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate
in favour of my right to choose which side
shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Our Bible study this morning was led once again by Dr Dalcy Badeli Dlamini, Bishop of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. She looked at the idea that ‘for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3: 26-28, NRSV).

Bishop Dalcy is the second woman bishop in Eswatini, and she is leading the Bible studies throughout this week, bringing fresh perspectives on leadership, faith and community.

Looking at the cross, she reminded us that the vertical line draws us up to God, while the horizontal line calls us to reach out to one another. We are called to put aside any differences that society has dictated to us.

She then asked us to consider five questions:

1, What do you understand by the phrase ‘all one in Christ Jesus’ in the context of Galatians 3: 26-28?

2, How does being ‘children of God through faith in Christ Jesus’ in Galatians influence your understanding of unity and equality in your context?

3, How can the church integrate the message of unity and equality in Galatians 3: 26-28 in its daily interactions and ministry with people from different religious and social status?

4, What practical steps can you take to overcome conflicts and divisions in our churches/contexts today?

5, What measures can the church put in place to reflect the unity and equality Paul speaks about in the passage of scripture?

Once again, there was a choice between three workshops this morning:

1, Beyond borders: Gender Justice female Leadership in the Anglican Church – this workshop was an invitation to explore the opportunities, strengths, and challenges for female leadership in the Anglican Church. The facilitators were USPG’s Senior Regional Managers Fran Mate and the Revd Davidson Solanki.

2, The Past in the Present: Mission, Empire and Racial Justice – this workshop explored the legacies of a history marked by slavery and racism that offer unique possibilities in the present. The facilitators were Dr Jo Sadgrove, the Revd Dr Evie Vernon and the Revd Garfield Campbell.

3, Seeing Differently – an interactive workshop using a real-life case study to recognise and reveal attitudes leading to exclusion of others in plain sight, drawing on the experiences of Gypsy Roma and Traveller Friendly Churches workshops.

The High Leigh Conference Centre near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire … the venue for the USPG conference this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The USPG conference began yesterday in the High Leigh Conference Centre near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and continues until tomorrow.

The annual meeting of the council of USPG this afternoon included the appointment of new trustees, reports on the vision and strategy of USPG, and reports on USPG’s work in Rethinking Mission, Energising Church and Championing Justice as the global mission agency, transforming mission thinking, practice and solidarity at the heart of the life of the Anglican Communion.

There were reports on USPG’s work with partners across the Anglican Communion in many areas, including theological education, economic justice, human trafficking and climate change. Staff members, including new members of staff, spoke of the diversity of their work and key highlights from the last six months, including this year’s Lent Appeal and a new website due to be launched in the weeks to come.

Today opened with morning worship led by Derby Guerrier from Haiti, and members of the Tsedaqah Community (Triangle of Hope), a missional community based at Liverpool Cathedral and made up of young people living together in community for a year. The Triangle of Hope links the Diocese of Kumasi in Ghana, the Diocese of Liverpool in the Church of England and the Diocese of Virginia in the US.

Tsedaqah community members work in a variety of social justice projects across the Liverpool City Region, in conjunction with the Anglican Diocese of Liverpool and Liverpool Cathedral.

Tsedaqah is a Hebrew word that means ‘righteousness' or ‘to do justice', the very reason that the community was formed. The instruction in Micah 6: 8 inspires its mission as a community, and community members seek to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. This passage from Micah was also the reading at our Evening Worship.

This morning’s worship included a prayer for immigrants from Pope Francis:

Merciful God, we pray to you for all the men, women and children who have died after leaving their homelands in search of a better life. Though many of their graves bear no name, to you each one is known, loved and cherished.

May we never forget them, but honour their sacrifice with deeds more than words. We entrust to you all those who have made this journey, enduring fear, uncertainty and humiliation, in order to reach a place of safety and hope.

Just as you never abandoned your Son as he was brought to a safe place by Mary and Joseph, so now be close to these, your sons and daughters, through our tenderness and protection. In caring for them may we seek a world where none are forced to leave their home and where all can live in freedom, dignity and peace.

Merciful God and Father of all, wake us from the slumber of indifference, open our eyes to their suffering, and free us from the insensitivity born of worldly comfort and self-centeredness.

Inspire us, as nations, communities and individuals, to see that those who come to our shores are our brothers and sisters.

May we share with them the blessings we have received from your hand, and recognise that together, as one human family, we are all migrants, journeying in hope to you, our true home, where every tear will be wiped away, where we will be at peace and safe in your embrace.

We were also invited to respond to a prayer from the Jesuit Father Dan Hartnett:

God of love and compassion: may we always recognise your spirit:

• in the refugee family, seeking safety from violence;
• in the migrant worker, bringing food to our tables;
• in the asylum-seekers, seeking justice for their families;
• in the unaccompanied child, traveling in a dangerous world.

Give us hearts that break open whenever our brothers and sisters turn to us.

Give us hearts that no longer turn deaf to their voices in times of need;

Give us eyes to recognise a moment for grace instead of a threat.

Give us voices that fail to remain silent but which decide instead to advocate prophetically.

Give us hands that reach out in welcome, but also in work, for a world of justice until all homelands are safe and secure.

The impaled arms of the Barclay and Buxton families in High Leigh … a reminder of the Barclay family who once owned High Leigh (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Thessaloniki exhibition in Paris museum recalls the stories of Jewish life in ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’

‘Salonika, Jerusalem of the Balkans, 1870-1920’ … the exhibition in the Jewish Museum of Art and History (mahJ) in Paris continues until 21 April (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

France is home to the third largest Jewish community in the world – after Israel and the US – with a Jewish presence goes back more than 2,000 years. Jewish people have lived in the Marais neighbourhood in Paris since the Middle Ages, and most Jewish people in Paris lived in the Marais until about 1985.

I spent some time in the Marais while we were in Paris last month, visiting synagogues, shops, cafés and other sites associated with Jewish life and history in Paris, and the two museums that document the history of Jews in France: the Shoah Memorial, the Holocaust Museum of Paris, opened in 2005; the Jewish Museum of Art and History (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme), commonly known as mahJ, has one of the finest collections in the world of objects of worship and art works.

The Jewish Museum in the Marais regularly hosts temporary exhibitions. The current temporary exhibition in mahJ, ‘Salonika, Jerusalem of the Balkans, 1870-1920,’ looks at Jewish life in Thessaloniki in Greece. The exhibition opened on 19 September 2023 and includes 150 photographs from the second half of the 19th century to the end of World War I.

Thessaloniki is the second city of Greece. It is the city of Aristotle and of Alexander the Great. In Byzantine times, it was second only to Constantinople as a political and cultural city, and with its walls, towers, churches and historical and archaeological sites, Thessaloniki remains a Byzantine city.

Thessaloniki was once the largest Jewish city in the world. The unique Jewish community of Thessaloniki has had a continued presence throughout the city’s 2,300-year history, a rare fact in Jewish history, even for Jerusalem or Alexandria. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Jewish community made up the majority of the population of the city.

Alexander the Great granted legal equality to Jews in 331 BCE. This new freedom attracted many Jews to settle in Hellenistic cities and to become Hellenised. Jews settled in the newly-established Thessaloniki in 315 BCE and there were new Jewish arrivals from Alexandria in 145 BCE.

After Jews were expelled from Spain, many Sephardic Jews moved to Thessaloniki. It is said 20,000 Sephardic moved to the city after 1492. By 1668, they were the largest community in the city, so that the Jewish community in Thessaloniki influenced the Sephardic around the world, both culturally and economically.

Thessaloniki was known among Jews for centuries as ‘the Mother of Israel,’ and to non-Jews as ‘the Jerusalem of the Balkans’ … one of the photographs in the exhibition (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The city was known in Ladino among Jews for centuries as la Madre de Israel or ‘the Mother of Israel,’ and to non-Jews as ‘the Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ It was the only major European city with a Jewish majority, and until 1923 shopkeepers of all traditions and denominations closed on Saturdays and during Jewish holidays.

When Thessaloniki was incorporated into the modern Greek state in 1912 it became the economic capital and second city of Greece, but continued to be the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ It remained so until the deportation of almost all the Jews of Thessaloniki by the occupying Nazis in 1943. In the spring and summer of 1943, 96% of the Jews of Thessaloniki were deported and killed, and the Nazis tried to erase all signs of the Jewish life and culture in the city.

I have visited Greece 40 or 50 times in the past 35 years and, after Crete and Athens, Thessaloniki is the place I have visited most. My first visits to Thessaloniki in the 1990s were working visits as a journalist. But I have often returned since on city breaks and on family occasions, to visit Mount Athos, and to visit the synagogues, the Jewish Museum and Jewish sites.

The popular Greek folksong Θεσσαλονίκη μου means every Greek knows the city as ‘My Thessaloniki.’ My grandfather, Stephen Edward Comerford (1867-1921), was posted there during World War, and it was there he caught the malaria that eventually led to his death. Had my grandfather died there and been buried in Greek soil, surely he too would have become a son of Greece, a son of Thessaloniki. Had he not been sent home from Thessaloniki, my father would not have been conceived … and I would not have been born. In some roundabout sort of way, this city is part of my life and part of my story, and this is ‘My Thessaloniki’ too.

All these memories and associations were brought to the fore once again when I visited the current exhibition in the Jewish Museum in the Marais in Paris last month. The prints by a local photographer Paul Zepdji and previously unpublished images by Ali Eniss, a keen amateur photographer, bring the vanished world to life.

The exhibition also includes French military documents, old postcards, brochures and magazines. The photographs and documents come from the 400-piece collection donated to the mahJ by Pierre de Gigord, a collector who was devoted to the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Pierre de Gigord’s collection is an important source for reconstructing Jewish life in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The great fire of August 1917 destroyed much of the city. The Jewish community saw its historic quarters, the municipal archives and more than 30 synagogues swept away by the flames. This makes Pierre de Gigord’s collection an important source for reconstructing Jewish life in the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’.

Pierre de Gigord was a keen traveller in the Orient and began assembling the richest private collection of early photographs of the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s. When his company Anastasia went out of business, Pierre de Gigord sold his collection to the Getty Museum. But it did not buy his glass plates of Thessaloniki, and these have been donated to the museum in Paris.

Ali Eniss was an interpreter at the German consulate during World War I and probably a spy. His photographs were discovered 40 years after he died and were sold to different dealers who eventually sent them to France.

The 150 works in the mahJ exhibition bring a vanished world back to life and tell the story of Thessaloniki from the second half of the 19th century to the end of World War I. The exhibits show men and women in traditional costumes, humble craftsmen, porters and shopkeepers, and members of the local ‘aristocracy’, linked by family and commercial ties to other parts of Europe.

Here I could see again the quays along the seafront, and the White Tower, the old cafés, restaurants and entertainment venues; elegant 19th century villas that are now decaying and crumbling; or the more deprived areas where industries were set up, making Thessaloniki the leading manufacturing city in the Ottoman Empire.

A devastating fire raged through Thessaloniki in 1917 and destroyed two-thirds of the Jewish districts, 45 synagogues, schools, shops and businesses. About 52,000 Jewish people were made homeless and most Jewish monuments and archives were destroyed. In the rebuilding programme, the historic centre of Thessaloniki lost the Jewish character that had enriched it for centuries.

The exhibition also tells the story of Thessaloniki’s unique Sabbatean community. The Sabbateans or Dönmeh dated from the 17th century. They can be traced back to the followers of Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676), a 17th-century rabbi and kabbalist from Smyrna who arrived in Thessaloniki claiming to be the Messiah.

They converted from Judaism to a form of Islam, but were said to have secretly held onto their Jewish beliefs and practices. They formed three main groups – the İzmirlis, Jakubis and Karakashi, and two smaller groups – the Kapantzi and Lechli. They married only each other (endogamy), and remained a closed group. But they became politically and economically powerful.

The banker Mehmet Kapantzi (1839-1924) was Mayor of Thessaloniki in 1908, and later Director of the Chamber of Commerce. His seafront villa was lavish and the building cost more than 40,000 gold sovereigns, a mythical amount in those days.

During the ‘population exchanges’ between Greece and Turkey following the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe,’ Muslims and Sabbateans are forced to leave Thessaloniki in 1923, never to return. They were replaced by large numbers of Greeks, many expelled from the west coast of Anatolia.

Only 1,200 Jews live in Thessaloniki today, and the Monasterioton Synagogue on Syngrou Street is the city’s only surviving, pre-war working synagogue. It was built in 1927 by Jews from Monastir in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The synagogue was saved during World War II because it had been requisitioned by the Red Cross as a warehouse. The building was structurally damaged by the earthquake in 1978, but it was restored by the Greek government.

In all, there are three surviving synagogues in Thessaloniki today, some surviving Jewish mansions on Vassilisis Olgas Avenue, the Modiano Market, and a new Jewish Cemetery in Stavroupoli. The Jewish Studies Centre at the Aristotelean University of Thessaloniki, and the Jewish Museum tells the story of a unique community, and the Jewish Museum on Agiou Mina Street opened in 2001.

The current exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History on Rue du Temple in Paris is curated by Catherine Pinguet and Nicolas Feuillie. It remains open until 21 April 2024.

Θεσσαλονίκη μου

Θεσσαλονίκη μου μεγάλη φτωχομάνα
εσύ που βγάζεις τα καλύτερα παιδιά
Θεσσαλονίκη μου μεγάλη φτωχομάνα
όπου κι αν πάω σ’ έχω πάντα στην καρδιά

Θεσσαλονίκη μου ποτέ δε σ’ απαρνιέμαι
είσ’ η πατρίδα μου, το λέω και καυχιέμαι

Thessaloniki, you great mother to the needy!
You are the one who gives the finest kids their start.
Thessaloniki, you great mother to the needy!
No matter where I go you’re always in my heart.
Thessaloniki, I will never be without you,
You are my home, I say it and I brag about you!

Shabbat Shalom

The exhibition on Thessaloniki at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris until 21 April 2024 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

A small square in front of a school in the Marais remembers the children of the Holocaust in Paris

The school on rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais in the Marais … 260 Jewish children from the school rounded up and murdered during the Holocaust (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

Le Parvis des 260-Enfants or the Square of the 260 Children is a tiny square or small open area in the Marais in Paris, in front of the elementary school of Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais.

The Marais is the historic centre of the Jewish community in Paris and I spent some time a few weeks ago, visiting synagogues, shops, cafés and other sites associated with Jewish life and history in Paris, and the two museums that document the history of Jews in France: the Shoah Memorial, the Holocaust Museum of Paris, and the Jewish Museum of Art and History (mahJ).

The name of Le Parvis des 260-Enfants recalls how 260 Jewish children from the school on rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais were deported during the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup on 16-17 July 1942 and then murdered in the Nazi death camps.

The school stands on the site of the former Marché Blancs-Manteaux market. The courtyard is housed in the old cut stone hall that once served as a butchery pavilion, first opened in 1823. This explains the twinned fountains on the façade with ox-heads whose horns and cheeks are decorated with fruits and pendants. The sculptures were made in an ancient Assyrian style in 1819 by the sculptor Edme Gaulle and were listed as historic monuments in 1970.

The school was founded in the Marais in 1844 and opened in 1847 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The school was founded in 1844, when Paris City Hall decided to provide a secular school for children in the Jewish community, with boys on one side (No 6) and girls on the other (No 10). Although financing was mainly from public or municipal sources, extra support came from the Consistory representing Jewish communities in Paris. Due to support from Baroness de Rothschild, the school was sometimes known as ‘the Rothschild school’ at the end of the 19th century.

An inscription above the boys’ door reads: ‘Communal Primary School for Young Israelite Boys – Mutual School – Municip Fund. June MDCCCXLIV’ (1844). A similar inscription above the girls’ entrance reads: ‘Communal Primary School for Young Israelite Girls – Mutual School.’

The school opened in 1847, with 338 boys and 370 girls in its early years. The first schoolgirl was five-year-old Sophie Léopold, the daughter of a shoemaker. Unlike other schools in Paris, the school closed on Saturday, and instead opened on Thursday, the day off in other schools. There was no religious instruction and neither teachers nor students were required to be Jewish.

During the Nazi occupation, Jewish people in France were forced to wear the yellow Star of David and were banned from certain professions and public places. Some deportations to the concentration camps began in 1940, and group roundups began in 1941. During the occupation, 76,000 of France’s 330,000 Jews were deported – and only 2,500 or so survivors returned.

On 16 and 17 July 1942, 13,152 Jews were rounded up. Of these, 8,160 people, including 4,115 children, were first taken to the Vél’ d’Hiv, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor bicycle racing track and stadium near the Eiffel Tower. They were held there for five days with little food and water and with no sanitary facilities, and eventually were deported to Auschwitz. The Vel’ d’Hiv roundup is recounted in the film La Rafle (2010).

Most schools in the Marais have placards recalling the Shoah or the Holocaust (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Most schools in the Marais have black placards with gold lettering recalling the Shoah or the Holocaust. Outside the school on Rue des Hospitalières Saint-Gervais, however, the placard is white with gold lettering. In all, 260 children from the school were deported during World War II, including 165 children in the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup. When the summer holidays came to an end, only two pupils on the school roll turned up when term commenced in October.

A plaque on the school reads: ‘To the memory of the children of this school deported between 1942 and 1944 because they were born Jewish. They were innocent victims of Nazi barbarism and the active complicity of the Vichy Government. They were exterminated in the death camps. May we never forget them.’

The stark language is haunting. The phrase ‘who were born Jewish’ is not the same as ‘who were Jewish.’ Under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis developed a ‘mixed-blood test’ to determine who was officially Jewish. The test defined as Jewish someone with one Jewish parent or one Jewish grandparent. To be Jewish was not necessarily about faith, culture or chosen identity, but was defined using pseudoscientific ideas based on the racist concept of multiple human ‘races.’ In all, over 11,000 children were deported from France to the east and the concentration camps ‘because they were born Jewish.’

The twinned ox-head fountains on the façade were made by the sculptor Edme Gaulle and are listed as historic monuments (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The head of Ecole des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, Joseph Migneret (1888-1949), watched as his pupils were almost totally nearly wiped out. At the start of the new school year on 1 October 1942, only four children turned up.

Migneret, who was not a Jew, joined an underground network to help children and their families to escape. He was actively involved in the Resistance, forging papers and hiding children in his home. Through the effort of Migneret and people like him, the lives of dozens of people were saved.

Migneret died shortly after World War II ‘of sadness at seeing what was done to his students’, according to one of the survivors. He was recognised as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, thanks to the testimony of Milo Adoner a former Jewish deportee. His name is inscribed among the 2,693 ‘Righteous of France’ on the Allée des Justes Monument.

A plaque remembers his actions: ‘To Joseph Migneret, teacher and director of this school from 1920 to 1944 who, through his courage and at the risk of his life, saved dozens of Jewish children from deportation. His grateful former students.’

A commemorative plaque was on the façade was unveiled on 7 May 1971 in memory of this tragedy. Two additional commemorative plaques nearby remember Lyon Léopold, a teacher at the school from 1853 to 1900, and Fernand Lévy-Wogue (1867-1944), founding president of the association of former students of the schools on rue des Tournelles and rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais.

The square in front of the school was renamed the 260-Enfants square in 2018 at a ceremony attended by Anne Hidalgo, the first woman Mayor of Paris, the politician Patrick Bloche and Ariel Weil, who has been the Mayor of Paris Centre since 2020 – his wife Delphine Horvilleur is France’s third female rabbi.

Shabbat Shalom

The square in front of the school was renamed the 260-Enfants square in 2018 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

‘The Meeting Place’ or ‘The Lovers Statue’ makes St Pancras ‘one of the most romantic meeting places’

‘The Meeting Place’ by Paul Day at St Pancras station is known popularly as ‘The Lovers Statue’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

‘The Meeting Place’ statue was the first thing we saw as we stepped off the Eurostar from Paris in St Pancras Station last month. The 9-metre tall bronze statue on the Grand Terrace shows a couple’s embrace and is known popularly as ‘The Lovers Statue.’

London and Continental Railways was responsible for the restoration of St Pancras, and it said in the brief for the commission that the sculpture should be romantic, democratic and as iconic as the Statue of Liberty in New York.

It is intended to evoke the romance of travel through the depiction of a couple locked in an amorous embrace. When the artist Paul Day created the work, he wanted to show a meeting of minds as well as a physical connection.

‘The Meeting Place’ is a 9-metre (30 ft) high, 20-tonne bronze sculpture at the south end of the upper level of St Pancras station. It was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II at the reopening of the station in 2007. It is reported to have cost £1 million and was installed as the centrepiece of the refurbished station.

‘The Meeting Place’ is modelled on the sculptor Paul Day and his French wife Catherine (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The work is modelled on the sculptor Paul Day and his wife. Day’s high-relief sculptures in terracotta, resin and bronze have been exhibited widely in Europe and his work is known for its unusual approach to perspective.

His other major works include the Battle of Britain Monument on the Victoria Embankment in London, the Iraq and Afghanistan Memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens, and ‘An Urban Comedy’, a long terracotta frieze in the Royal Galleries of Saint-Hubert in Brussels.

A high-relief frieze was added to the base of ‘The Meeting Place’ in 2008. It features images from the history of the Tube and train, including: people queuing on platforms or travelling in carriages; soldiers departing for war and returning injured; and repair works following the 7 July 2005 London bombings. The frieze stirred controversy when it was first put in place, as one panel depicted a commuter falling into the path of a train driven by the Grim Reaper.

Day said the piece to be in a ‘tragi-comic style’ and believed it was ‘a metaphor for the way people’s imaginations ran wild.’ But he revised the frieze before the final version was installed, and replaced that panel.

The interesting details in the frieze include sunglasses reflecting commuters at the station, a ‘bag lady’ with and her dog, a woman checking her phone over the shoulder of her lover, and a family waving their loved ones off to war.

A woman checks her phone over the shoulder of her lover … the frieze below ‘The Meeting Place’ in St Pancras Station (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Paul Day studied at art schools in Colchester and Dartington, and completed his training at Cheltenham in 1991. He now lives in a village near Dijon with his French wife Catherine. Their Anglo-French relationship is an explicit and repeated theme in his work, and their embrace in the Meeting Place stands as a metaphor for the role of St Pancras as the terminus of the rail link between England and France.

One critic singled out The Meeting Place as ‘a very good example of the crap out there.’ Another dismissed it as ‘barely a work of art.’ Day accepted a ‘lot of people will no doubt detest it because it is not violent or controversial,’ and admitted ‘some will say it is a chocolate box sculpture.’

Despite these harsh criticisms from major figures in the art world, the statue has become popular with the public. The World’s Most Romantic Spots by the Lonely Planet in 2011 said the statue was a key reason for describing the station as one of the most romantic meeting places in the world.

‘The Meeting Place’ stands beneath a replica of the huge St Pancras clock, a work of art in itself. The original clock, with a diameter of 5.15 metres (16 ft 9 in), was said to be the largest clock at any railway station in England, with the hand 4 ft 5 in long and the minute hand 7 ft 3 ins Like all the clocks at St Pancras, the original clock was made by John Walker of Cornhill, London, and the clock dial was made of slate. The present replica was made by Dent with Smith of Derby.

Close-by is the larger-than-life statue by Martin Jennings of the poet Sir John Betjeman, who led the campaign to save St Pancras Station and the Chambers from demolition in the 1960s.

‘The Meeting Place’ in St Pancras Station stands beneath the huge St Pancras clock, a work of art in itself (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The Jewish Museum in Paris tells the stories of over 2,000 years of Jewish history in France

Inside the Jewish Museum of Art and History (mahJ) in the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in Paris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

France is home to the third largest Jewish community in the world – after Israel and the US – with a Jewish presence goes back more than 2,000 years. Jewish people have lived in the Marais neighbourhood in Paris since the Middle Ages, and most Jewish people in Paris lived in the Marais until about 1985.

I spent some time in the Marais while we were in Paris last month, visiting synagogues, shops, cafés and other sites associated with Jewish life and history in Paris, and the two museums that document the history of Jews in France: the Shoah Memorial, the Holocaust Museum of Paris, opened in 2005; the Jewish Museum of Art and History (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme), commonly known as mahJ, has one of the finest collections in the world of objects of worship and art works.

The museum is housed in the majestic setting of the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion at 71 Rue de Temple. Originally the Hôtel d’Avaux, it was built in 1644-1650 to designs by the architect Pierre Le Muet for Cardinal Mazarin’s Superintendent of Finances, Claude de Mesmes, Comte d’Avaux. It was later bought by Paul de Beauvilliers, Duc de Saint-Aignan, who added the grand staircase.

The museum focuses on the Jewish culture of France. It opened in 1998 and is the largest French museum of Jewish art and history. The permanent exhibition traces the history of the Jewish people of France, Europe and the Maghreb, through art and heritage. It is dedicated to preserving 2,000 years of Jewish history in France, with over 12,000 paintings, artworks, sculptures, furniture, religious artefacts and other items dating back to the Middle Ages.

Claude-Gérard Marcus, Victor Klagsbald, and Alain Erlande-Brandenburg initiated the project to set up the museum in 1985 and were supported by the City of Paris and the Ministry of Culture. At the time, there was a modest Jewish museum, on the rue des Saules. The then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, provided the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais for the future museum.

The choice of location was poignant: when the French Vichy collaborators were rounding up Jews for the Nazis in 1942, several of the hôtel’s residents were arrested and deported, and 13 Jewish inhabitants were murdered in the Nazi death camps.

The Marais was also chosen because it had once been the centre of Jewish life in Paris. The architects Catherine Bizouard and Francois Pin redesigned the building as a museum, making at a centre for education and research and a cultural venue.

The permanent collection had three main sources: the Musée d’art Juif in Paris; the Muséenational du Moyen-Age, also known as the Musée Cluny, with a collection built up by Isaac Strauss in the 19th century; and long-term loans from museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre and the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. In addition, there were loans from the Consistory of Paris, the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Fondation du Judaïsme Français.

The mahJ looks at Jewish history in France from its beginnings until the birth of the State of Israel, without including the Holocaust. The project for the Mémorial de la Shoah, now 800 yards metres the museum, already existed and was commemorating the Holocaust, and the two actually complement each other.

I have visited Jewish museums in other European cities, from Dublin and Seville to Krakow, Prague and Bratislava, from Thessaloniki and Rhodes to Venice and Vienna. Unlike other Jewish museums, though, the mahJ in Paris is not a community or confessional museum. Instead, it shows the story of Jewish life in France through time and space, and also helps to ask questions about Judaism and Jewish identity.

The permanent collection highlights the diversity and unity in rituals, beliefs, art, and material culture of Jewish communities in Europe and North Africa, and large part of the collection includes works of art from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century.

Mediaeval gravestones engraved in Hebrew were discovered in 1849 at the site of a 13th century Jewish cemetery in Paris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The story of Jews in France is unique, with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews living side-by-side and the two traditions mingling. French Jews had a rich cultural life in the Middle Ages, with great thinkers such as the 11th century rabbi Rashi.

Philip August was the first European monarch to exile a country’s Jews, in 1182, but invited them back 16 years later. Philippe IV of France issued an edict in 1306 expelling Jews from France and Charles VI finally banned them completely in 1394.

The museum displays a number of mediaeval gravestones engraved in Hebrew, discovered in 1849 with the remains of a 13th century Jewish cemetery. They are testimony to the Jewish presence in Paris during the Middle Ages, despite many persecutions.

Jewish Emancipation in France began at the French Revolution, and Jews became citizens in 1790-1791. The consistories were created in 1808 when Napoleon organised French Judaism.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus with his broken sword … a statue by Tim Mitelberg in the museum courtyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a major setback for Jews in France at the end of the 19th century. He was accused of high treason and was only cleared years later. The museum’s Dreyfus archive consists of more than 3,000 manuscripts, letters, photographs, family heirlooms and official documents. Outside, in the centre of the courtyard, stands an 8-ft tall reproduction of a statue by the Polish-born French artist Louis ‘Tim’ Mitelberg (1919-2002) showing Dreyfus holding his broken sword.

A section on intellectual and political movements in Europe at the turn of the century includes the emergence of Zionism, the rebirth of the Hebrew language, the blooming of Yiddish culture, and the creation of political movements in Russia and Poland, with a small section looking at the creation of the state of Israel.

The museum decided not to have a collection devoted to the Holocaust because the Shoah Memorial had already been launched in Paris. However, the museum traces the lives of some East European, Russian, Polish and Romanian Jews who came to live in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. The museum traces the lives of 12 of these Jewish immigrants to Paris, illustrating Jewish life in the Marais before the deportations during World War II. Several scale models of synagogues from East Europe, most of them destroyed by the Nazis, are reminders of a world that has disappeared.

‘Circoncision’ (1740) … one of several paintings by Marco Marcuola depicting Jewish life in Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

One room is devoted to Jewish life during the Italian Renaissance in Modena, Venice and other cities. It includes synagogue furnishings, including a rare Holy Ark (Aron haKodesh) from a synagogue in Modena, silverware, liturgical embroideries and several paintings attributed to Marco Marcuola (1740-1793) depicting Jewish life in Venice.

A 1720 masterpiece in late-Baroque style by Alessandro ‘il Lissandrino’ Magnasco depicts a Jewish funeral.

The ark from Modena is the only surviving 15th century Ashkenazi ark, and was probably made by the artists Lorenzo and Cristoforo Canozzi.

A small collection of 17th and 18th century Dutch engravings represent the wanderings of Spanish Jews after the expulsions in the 15th century. A series by Bernard Picart shows how Portuguese Jews integrated into communities in Amsterdam, London and Bordeaux after their expulsion in 1496-1497.

A glimpse inside a well-preserved 19th century painted sukkah from Austria or south Germany (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

An entire room is dedicated to the holiday of Hanukkah, with an exceptional collection of Hanukkiyot, and another to Pesach or Passover. A well-preserved late 19th century painted sukkah or booth from Austria or south Germany was used for the festival of Sukkot (‘Tabernacles’). It is made of pine and its panels are decorated with scenes of an Austrian village, the first few words of the Ten Commandments, and a view of Jerusalem.

The Sephardic collection illustrates the wealth of traditions and ceremonies among Jews in the Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire. There are wedding costumes donated to the museum by Jewish Moroccan families living in France after decolonisation, including a ceremonial bridal dress late 19th century, silk velvet, gold braid handed down from mother to daughter in the one family in Tetuan.

A section on the Jewish presence in 20th century art highlights the Jewish cultural renaissance in Germany and Russia but also looks at important and sometimes forgotten artists, whose works include folklore, ornamental motifs, Biblical subjects and calligraphy, and the contribution of Jewish artists in the early 20th century.

The art collections in mahJ include works by Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani, and others, including works by Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Chaïm Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Jacques Lipchitz, Chana Orloff, Yitzhak Frenel and Emmanuel Mane-Katz.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) painted Les Portes du cimetière (‘The Gates of the Cemetery’) in 1917 shortly after finding his grandfather’s grave in Vitebsk. Ida Chagall donated this painting to the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1984, a year before he died. In this painting, he associates the themes of death and resurrection with Balfour Declaration and the initial hopes for Jewish liberation after the Russian revolution in 1917.

Chagall was also inspired by words from the prophet Ezekiel: ‘I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people! And I will bring you back into the land of Israel’ (Ezekiel 37: 12-14). Two other paintings by Chagall depict the life of Jews in the shtetls.

The museum also regularly hosts temporary exhibitions. The current temporary exhibition, ‘Salonika, Jerusalem of the Balkans, 1870-1920,’ looks at Jewish life in Thessaloniki in Greece. But more about that on another day, perhaps.

Shabbat Shalom

‘Les Portes du cimetière’ (‘The Gates of the Cemetery’) painted by Marc Chagall in 1917 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The Shoah Memorial inParis is a reminder of the Holocaust and of the evils of antisemitism

The Mur des Names or Wall of Names in the Mémorial de la Shoah lists 76,000 French Jews deported and murdered by the Nazis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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 is the Holocaust museum and memorial in Paris (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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 inscriptions in Hebrew and French on the façade, with quotations from Zalman Shnoeur and Justin Godart (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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.’

A circular memorial lists the names of the death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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.

Bas-reliefs by Arbit Blatas symbolise the camps and the persecution of the Jews in France (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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.

The Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in the crypt dates from 1957 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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.

A door from Beaune-la-Rolande internment and transit camp (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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.

The Wall of the Righteous lists 3,300 people who have been recognised as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

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)