Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Holocaust Memorial, located in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, is a place of memory dedicated to the genocide of Jews during the Second World War. It gathers a museum on Jewish history during this period, commemorative spaces such as the Wall of Names and the crypt housing the tomb of the unknown Jewish martyr, as well as the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC), founded clandestinely in 1943 in Grenoble to collect evidence of Nazi crimes. The current site, inaugurated in 2005, replaces the former Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr (1957) and extends with an antenna in Drancy in 2012, on the site of the former camp internment.

The Wall of Names, inaugurated in 2005 by Jacques Chirac, lists 75,568 Jews deported from France, including 11,400 children. The crypt, designed in 1957, houses ashes of victims of the Warsaw camps and ghetto, symbolized by a star of David and an eternal flame. The Children's Memorial presents 3,000 photographs of deported children, while the Wall of the Righteous, inaugurated in 2006, honours the French who saved Jews.

The Memorial offers temporary exhibitions, educational activities (school visits, teacher training, trips to Auschwitz), and a historical journal created in 1946. It also houses a specialized bookshop and a sound work, Le passage amplified (2008), dedicated to deported children. The CDJC, integrated with the site, maintains 40 million documents, accessible to researchers and the public.

The Memorial has been conducted since 2005 by Éric de Rothschild. Its main access is at 17 Geoffroy-l-Asnier Street, near Saint Paul Metro Stations and Hôtel de Ville. Several films were made there, of which Her name was Sarah (2010) and Les Héritiers (2014), reflecting her role in the transmission of memory.

The Drancy antenna, opened in 2012 by François Hollande, completes this memorial device by marking the location of the main French transit camp towards the extermination camps. The Memorial collaborates with international institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and participates in educational projects, including a summer university.

Collection

Le mémorial de la Shoah réunit dans un même lieu :

- Un musée consacré à l'histoire juive durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale dont l'axe central est l'enseignement de la Shoah.

- Plusieurs "lieux de mémoire" : le tombeau du martyr juif inconnu (dans la crypte), le mur des Noms, le mémorial des enfants, et le mur des Justes.

- Le Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC).

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