“We wanted the hotel to feel like it has always been a part of the Marais landscape,” Swedish, London-based interior designer Martin Brudnizki is quoted on the website of the new Paris 5-star hotel Le Grand Mazarin as saying. “… We were therefore inspired by the great Houses of the aristocratic era.”

He is referring there to the mansions and townhouses built in the 17th century when the Marais became trendy territory for the construction of noble residences and their continued use and decorative evolution by the titled and entitled through most of the 18th century. The Revolution then sent the aristocratic owners and renters either into exile or to the guillotine, after which “always been a part of the Marais landscape” came to mean something vastly different.

No longer marked by great wealth and privilege, the Marais was increasingly defined by labor, light industry, immigration and poverty. There were still dozens of grand old mansions around, but by 1900, the Marais swelled with a poor and working-class population, including many immigrants, among them thousands of Jews from Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, with many more arriving through the 1930s. The Holocaust then sent the Jewish population either fleeing or to the death camps, leaving behind a decrepit cityscape that the rare visitor in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, even 1970s may well have thought had “always been a part of the Marais.”

The 311-acre heart of the Marais was saved from further ruin and the specter of concrete-and-glass renewal by a national law of 1962 calling for district-wide historic preservation and restoration. The law, along with the subsidies, public works and business opportunities that would eventually follow, accompanied the continuing evolution of the Marais, with: the arrival of Sephardic Jews to Paris in the 1950s and 1960s; the opening of the Picasso Museum in 1985; the opening of gay bars and clubs in the latter half of that decade; the steep rise in real estate prices in the 1990s; the development through the 2000s of rue des Rosiers, formerly part of the Pletzl at the epicenter of pre-war Yiddish-speaking immigration in the Marais, into a street that’s part Jewish food court part internationally-branded boutiques, and, in the 2010s, the listing of a considerable number of properties on Airbnb, each promising “charm” and “exposed wooden beams” (read: old buildings now gentrified).

Slowly at first, then much quicker since the mid-1980s, the Marais evolved into such a well-maintained on-the-radar quarter for strolling, shopping, museum-going, art-gallery-contemplating, café-sitting, with a few gay bars here, and a few Jewish restaurants there, that today’s visitor might think that its trendy bourgeois-casual lifestyle and the ease of communicating in English “have always been a part of the Marais landscape.”

Le Grand Mazarin

Where, then, do Le Grand Mazarin and its restaurant Boubalé fit into today’s Marais?

On the edge, or in many ways as its main entrance, catercorner to City Hall, in a 19th-century building across the street from the BHV Marais department store, at one corner of Place Harvey Milk, named for assassinated American defender of gay rights. A doorman in pride purple livery stands by the hotel entrance.

Past the small reception area, the drawing-room lobby presents a muted flamboyance, introducing visitors to the muted greens, reds and blues that dominate throughout the building and to the cozy, quirky, sophisticated nostalgia that impregnates the place.

The 50 rooms and 11 suites present a potpourri of furnishings, each outlined with a prominent curve or bevel, with enough reminders of 18th-century styles that the pre-Revolutionary petite noblesse would feel very much at ease here. It’s design without being high design, welcoming without being precious, indulgent without being lavish. Above all, it’s stylishly comfortable. The rooms are of modest size, as one would expect in the Marais. Rates start at 590€ and will rise beginning spring 2024.

The hotel’s restaurant Boubalé, described below, serves traditional Askenazic/Israeli fare. There’s also has a little, kitsch-chic, ground-floor bar. In the basement there’s an attractive pool with a fresco reminiscent of Cocteau’s work along its arched ceiling. A VIP basement lounge-bar will also soon open in another portion of the basement.

All told, the upmarket hotel, restaurant, bar and VIP room that form Le Grand Mazarin don’t seem to have “always been a part of the Marais landscape” so much as they present a cheery, nostalgic pastiche of major markers of the Marais of the past five centuries.

Boubalé

This restaurant and its adjacent bar are very much part and parcel of Le Grand Mazarin but with separate entrances from the hotel. So they can certainly be considered for anyone not lodging upstairs.

While the hotel’s rooms and suites call to mind the well-being of the petite noblesse, Boubalé—the restaurant’s name is a Yiddish term of endearment—and the bar appear to have been inspired by a vigorous and stylish older actress in Yiddish theater who enjoys hanging out with the younger crowd.

As noted above, the restaurant serves traditional Ashkenazic/Israeli cuisine. Jerusalem-born chef Assaf Granit has become a prime purveyor of Israeli cuisine in France. He’s the first Israeli chef to have a Michelin star in France (at Shabour in the Paris’s 2nd arrondissement). As executive chef with the JLM Group, he has been overseeing Boubalé in its opening period before the restaurant’s executive chef Itmar Gargei takes full command of the kitchen.

“Tradition, tradition!… Tradition!”—you know the song. This is the menu version of that: challah, pastrami plate, gravlax, roast beets with feta and horseradish, chopped chicken liver… seafood knaidlach, “ashkenazi mesachen,” “goulash+gnochhis”… strudel, babka… More polished than revisited, it’s all tasty—“entertaining” is perhaps a more accurate word—in a traditional smorgasbord kind of way. If not made with Bubbie love, then at least made with open-kitchen care. Ordering several appetizers (we ordered nearly all of them) to share is the way to go, both to get a taste of the various dishes and to get into the upbeat spirit of the place. The aforementioned Yiddish actress may well have had the tableware custom-made in the old country; her children will let it gather dust in the closet when they inherit it, but the grandkids and their kids will find it delightful. Anyway, Boubalé isn’t meant for her own children, now too old for this. On the two evening that I dined here (once as a guest*, once as a host), the majority of the crowd appeared to be under 35. There’s a good, upbeat vibe if you don’t mind the rising music and voice level as the evening progresses.

A 3-course meal, with challah (10€), will run about 75€, without drinks. I leave it to you to decide if that’s “oy vey” pricing.

The Bar

As someone who enjoys the atmosphere of hotel bars, I found the playful kitsch-chic décor of the little ground-floor bar quite to my liking as a place to wind down the evening. Here, I had my first taste of the Tunisian fig brandy Boukha, a drink with an Ashkenazic-Sephardic history of its own. The basement club/bar, is intended as a no-cell phone space to wind up the night, wasn’t yet open when I visited.

Le Grand Mazarin and the restaurant Boubalé, 17 rue de la Verrerie, Paris 4th arrondissement.

Le Grand Mazarin is the latest of the Pariente family’s slowly growing collection of distinctive 5-star hotels under the umbrella name Maisons Pariente, including Crillon Le Brave in Provence, Le Coucou in Méribel and Lou Pinet in Saint Tropez.

* Disclaimer: As many readers know, I wear various professional hats: travel writer and editor of this publication, travel and tour advisor for agencies and individuals, and organizer/guide in Paris and throughout France. I have worn all three with respect to Le Grand Mazarin: 1. In writing this article. 2. In first dining here as a guest on a site visit with a luxury travel agency, then second dining here on a tasting tour that I organized and hosted for visitors to Paris. 3. Subsequent to that first visit I was hired by the hotel to give a tour of the Marais to visiting journalists.

© 2023, Gary Lee Kraut

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Watch the video interview below to understand the dual nature of Sofia Falkovitch and her work, at once alien and fully connected. She speaks here of her childhood in the former Soviet Union, her decision to pursue cantorial studies in Berlin, the experience of leading a service in a predominately Orthodox synagogue in Germany, and her vision of music and song as a way of bringing people together, not only within the Jewish community but within broader society. She also speaks of her love of Paris as an exciting “platform where cultures and religions meet.”

The interview was filmed in the main sanctuary at the Copernic Synagogue in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Home to the Union Libérale Israélite de France, Copernic is France’s oldest Liberal or Reform synagogue, dating to 1907. It is Falkovitch’s local synagogue since she is married to Rabbi Jonas Jacquelin, one of its religious leaders. (They have two children.) Falkovitch is not, however, the cantor at the Copernic Synagogue, nor is she permanently employed elsewhere. She has opted for an international career singing both liturgical music and classical works. Indeed, Falkovitch is also an accomplished concert mezzo-soprano who has performed in synagogues, churches, concert halls and theaters around the world.

For those unfamiliar with Judaism, the cantor or hazan is the synagogue official who sings liturgical music and leads the congregation in chanted prayer. The three main currents in Judaism, called Orthodox, Conservative and Reform in English, are called Orthodox, Massorti and Libéral in French. While Reform and Liberal may be used interchangeably, and in fact both are part of the overall movement of Progressive Judaism, individual synagogues and practices will vary due to cultural and community influences.

The equality of men and women is an essential value in the Progressive movement. Though Progressive Judaism is well established in the United States, it has been less prominent in Europe, and particularly in France, until recently.

Beyond the alluring color of her voice and the elegance of her presence, Sofia Falkovitch is an articulate representative of this current of Judaism while also carving her own path as a singer. Having grown up in Moscow, studied in Germany, Israel and Canada, and now living in Paris, her mastery of seven languages (French, English, Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Spanish) itself speaks volumes about her sense of the importance of communication among individuals, faiths and cultures.

Watch the interview here:

See Sofia Falkovitch’s website for further information about her work, upcoming concert dates and information about her latest CD, released in 2019, entitled “The Voice of Sacred Heritage,” in which she interprets psalms and sacred Hebrew music.

The Copernic Synagogue and Organized Jewish Life in Western Paris

The Copernic Synagogue is located at 24 rue Copernic in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. (Synagogues in Paris are commonly referred to by the name of the street on which they’re located.) Visitors interested in attending services or a concert at Copernic must contact the synagogue in advance. Services at Copernic are accompanied by an organist and a choir.

The above interview took place in the synagogue’s Art Deco sanctuary built 1923-1924. Despite opposition from some in the community who have fought for the sanctuary’s preservation, the community’s board has elected to replace it with a new sanctuary as part of a future expansion of the synagogue complex. The project is currently in the fundraising phase. Questions of preservation aside, the planned expansion is a sign of the evolution of the infrastructure.

In the same vein, on the far edge of the 17th arrondissement, Kehilat Gesher, a bilingual (French-English) Liberal community, is about to move into its new synagogue at 11 avenue de la Porte de Champerret. American-born Rabbi Tom Cohen is the driving force behind that community. He’s married to Pauline Bebe, France’s first female rabbi. See the article A Couple of Rabbis in Paris.

The 17th arrondissement and its neighboring suburbs have increasingly become a hub of Jewish activity of various mainstream currents, both in residential and organizational terms. In October 2019 the European Jewish Center was inaugurated in this same district by President Emmanuel Macron.

Bei Mir Bistu Shein

Let’s end with two minutes of Yiddiskeit at the Copernic Synagogue. In the video below, The Moscow Male Jewish Cappella, led by its founder and artistic director Alexander Tsaliuk, performs Bei Mir Bistu Shein (בײַ מיר ביסטו שיין; To Me You’re Beautiful).

© 2020, Gary Lee Kraut

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A Jewish Tour of Paris: Exploring Historical and Contemporary Paris through the Lives of Jews. An illustrated lecture by Gary Lee Kraut

With more than 500,000 Jews, France has the world’s third largest Jewish population, after Israel and the United States. More than half of French Jews live in Paris and the surrounding region. Yet aside from occasional reports of anti-Semitism, Americans, even Jewish Americans, are generally unaware of the history and contemporary life of Jews in the French capital.

This lecture follows in the footsteps of other lectures that Kraut has presented in the U.S. over the years on various topics of interest to both travelers and armchair travelers, including American War Memories in France; Travel and Travel Writing Beyond the Clichés; Got Heritage?: Understanding Patrimoine; DIY Biking in France, and A History of the Wines of Burgundy and Champagne.

As diverse as these topics are, they, and now A Jewish Tour of Paris, encourage a connection between the Americans and the history, culture, people and contemporary life of France.

In “A Jewish Tour of Paris,” Kraut presents 20 sights, individuals and neighborhoods that reveal various aspects of the history of Jews in Paris. After briefly examining medieval Jewry and medieval expulsions, he will speak of the liberating laws of the French Revolution, the appeal of France to European Jews throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries, the construction of major synagogues, the Dreyfus Affair, Jewish artists of the 1920s, the Holocaust, Sephardic immigration of the 1950s and 60s, and more recent events, along with major French figures of the past 200 years and contemporary Jewish life as a visitor may encounter it today.

This lecture will be of interest to armchair travelers as well as travelers who have visited or plan to visit Paris. For the latter, Gary Lee Kraut will be available for private consultations upon advance request.

For tickets and further information contact the hosting organizations directly. Non-members of those organizations are typically allowed to attend.

If interested in hosting this lecture within your own organization, contact Gary Lee Kraut at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

Lecture schedule, Feb. 2 – March 1, 2020

Sunday February 2, 10am. A Jewish Tour of Paris
Adath Israel Synagogue, Lawrenceville, New Jersey
1958 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648
Tel. 609-896-4977

Wednesday February 5, 7-8:30pm. A Jewish Tour of Paris
East Brunswick Public Library, New Jersey
2 Jean Walling Civic Center Dr, East Brunswick, NJ 08816
Tel. 732-390-6767

Wednesday February 5, 9:45-11:30am. A History of the Wines of Burgundy and Champagne (and how to visit those wine regions)
Alliance Française de Doylestown, Pennsylvania
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 301 N Main St, Doylestown, PA 18901
Actually entitled Une histoire des vins de Bourgogne et de Champagne since this presentation will be in French.

Friday February 7, 6-7:30pm. A Jewish Tour of Paris
Alliance Française de Philadelphie, Pennsylvania
1420 Walnut Street – Suite 700, Philadelphia, PA 19102
Tel. 215-735-5283

Sunday, February 9, 2-5pm. Travel and Touring in Paris and Throughout France
A private event in Trenton-Princeton area of New Jersey for those planning to travel to France in 2020. If interested in attending contact Gary directly for details at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

Thursday February 13, 11:15am-12:15pm. A Jewish Tour of Paris
Jewish Community Center of Central New Jersey (Scotch Plains)
1391 Martine Avenue, Scotch Plains, NJ 07076
Tel. 908-889-8800 x260

Wednesday February 19, 10:30am-noon. A Jewish Tour of Paris.
Beth El Hebrew Congregation of Alexandria, Virginia.
Organized by The Posner Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia for their Adult Outreach Program, the lecture will be held at Beth El Hebrew Congregation, 3830 Seminary Road, Alexandria, Virginia 22304
Tel. 703-537-3026

Thursday February 20, 7pm. A Jewish Tour of Paris.
Alliance Française de Washington, DC
2142 Wyoming Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20008
Tel. 202-234-7911

Wednesday February 26, 6pm. A Jewish Tour of Paris.
Alliance Française de Miami Metro, Florida
1221 Brickell Avenue Business Center, 6th floor, Miami, FL
Tel. 305-395-4100

Friday February 28, 9:3am-11:30am. Travel and Touring in Paris and Throughout France.
Orlando, Florida
Meet Gary for coffee at Le Café de Paris, 5170 Dr Phillips Blvd, Orlando, anytime between 9:30am and 11:30am for an informal meet-and-greet for those planning to travel to France in 2020 or dreaming of 2021. Write to Gary directly at gary [at] francerevisited.com if you’d like to meet that day but are unavailable that morning.

Sunday March 1, 3:30PM. Les Misérables, film presentation and discussion
ACME Screening Room, Lambertville, New Jersey
25 S Union Street, Lambertville, NJ 08530
Gary Lee Kraut leads a discussion of the Oscar-nominated film Les Misérables following a projection at the Acme Screening Room.

The post Lecture: A Jewish Tour of Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

For the second year in a row France has therefore seen more Jews immigrating to Israel than any other country. France has the largest Jewish population in Western Europe, with estimates ranging from 500-550,000. The Jewish Agency says that in the past decade more than 30,000 French Jews have immigrated to Israel, with more than half being under 35 years old. The Jewish Agency does not provide figures on the number of Jews who return to their country of birth or the reasons for their immigration. Immigration to Israel is known as Aliyah in Hebrew.

Despite its significance, the official figure is nearly half of the 15,000 departures that the Jewish Agency predicted for 2015 following the terrorist attacks of January 7-9, 2015. In those attacks radical Islamists targeting journalists at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices, Jews at the Hyper Casher kosher grocery and law enforcement agents on the street were responsible for killing 17 people.

Interestingly, surveys by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League have found that anti-Semitic attitudes in France decreased between autumn 2014 and spring 2015 for the overall population, perhaps because the January attacks brought wide public awareness to violence against Jews. The surveys also showed that while anti-Semitic sentiment among Muslims throughout Europe is much higher than among the general population, French Muslims have a slightly lower “index score” with respect to anti-Semitism than Muslims in the five other European countries where the issue was examined: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. For the ADL’s Executive Summary of those surveys see here.

Jewish emigration from France—for religious reasons, out of fear and/or for economic reasons—is among the topics covered in an interview by France Revisited’s editor Gary Lee Kraut with Tom Cohen, rabbi of Paris’s bilingual (French-English) synagogue Kahilat Gesher, that appears in the January 2016 issue of British monthly newspaper The Connexion.

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I might have bought a copy myself, but the first batch was out by the time I left the apartment, and a friend soon sent me the complete pdf.

One couldn’t avoid seeing the cover of the issue in France, whether at the newsstand or on TV or, without any particular search, on the internet. How strange, how revealing of cultural differences it was then to be an American in Paris surrounded by images of the cover of Charlie Hebdo, and then to see that American news sources, while reporting heavily on the subject, were self-censoring or actively avoiding showing the cover, while in some countries mobs were called to violence to denounce the image.

The prominence and the significance of the news of the publication of the first survivor issue of Charlie Hebdo made January 14 feel like the winter, newspaper version of May 1, when it’s customary for French to give each other a sprig of lily of the valley as a sign of friendship, love, good luck or social justice or in the name of tradition or obligation. (On the news we saw that for those who opposed the right to publish a caricature of the prophet it was a day of rage.)

The attack at Hyper Cacher may have come after the attack on Charlie Hebdo had already brought us out onto the street, but it was part and parcel of the events of January 7-9. So within all the earnestness and giddiness surrounding the sale of Charlie Hebdo, the day’s lily of the valley, news outlets in France and abroad were also showing long lines of people buying kosher food. “After all,” a young blond woman said as her 4-year-old held up a can of kosher pastrami, “just as few people buying the post-assassination Charlie Hebdo issue bought it for the contents, one needn’t buy kosher food for the blessing.” There was a great sense that, beyond the rally of January 11, on an otherwise typical work day, millions of people would continue to affirm the values of the republic by honoring both the rights and security of those who would mock religious dogma and institutions and their perverse effects, on the one hand, and the rights and security of those who wish to eat or otherwise pray in the private sphere according to religious dogma, on the other.

Well, no, actually. I made that up. No one spoke of buying kosher food to also show their support for the freedoms that the terrorists wished to eradicate.

Was it so difficult to support both secularism and the peaceful practice or non-practice of religion? Or did one feel a need to choose sides among victims and what they represent or are thought to represent?

I would think not. As Charlie Hebdo’s own editorial of January 14 states: “No, in this massacre, there are no deaths less injust than others” (Non, dans ce massacre, il n’y a pas de morts moins injuste que d’autres).

Having read the survivor issue of Charlie Hebdo, I also wanted to buy some kosher food. I needed to go shopping anyway: a journalist friend (religious affiliation, if any, unknown) was coming for dinner.

There are no specific kosher shops in my neighborhood so I went looking at a local grocery store. I couldn’t find a kosher section there, and there was no kosher food in the store’s “World” section.

The “World” section did, however, have Sabbath candles (bottom shelf, blue box in the photo). I thought this odd given that there’s a candle section on the opposite side of the store. I then realized that it wasn’t so odd since they were next to Italian rice and pasta even though the store has large rice and pasta sections. The logic is that a customer would go to the “World” section to look not for rice or pasta but for Italian goods. The Sabbath candles, made in Israel, are therefore considered at this grocery store as national rather than religious items, as though one might want to serve Italian pasta, Spanish olives and Chinese tea light by Israeli candles.

The French have been debating whether Jews form a “nation apart” or not since at least the Revolution. In December 1789, the National Assembly inconclusively debated the issue of the rights of Jews in a post-despotic France, with two main arguments arising: one said that, given the chance, Jews can be assimilated with and citizens of the larger society, the other said that Jews are bound to be a nation apart and so cannot be citizens of the nation of France.

French Jews were given the full rights of citizenship (emancipated) in two blocks: in January 1790 by a law largely covering Sephardic Jews of southwest France and the area around Avignon, and in September 1791 by a law covering Ashkenazic Jews (mostly in Alsace and Lorraine) and others.

The debate of the place of Jews in French society nevertheless continued, mostly in attempts (at times successful) to reduce the rights of Jews. The debate can still be heard, and not just among gentiles. In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahu weighed in in favor of nationhood at his speech at the Great Synagogue of Paris on January 11, when he invited Jews to come “home” to the nation he leads. To which some congregants responded by singing their national anthem, La Marseillaise.

I bought the Sabbath candle. I was pleased with the symbolism of the Sabbath itself being a Jewish hebdo (hebdo means weekly) and with the thought that I would light the table with them that Wednesday evening.

When I mentioned to my guest that since I was unable to buy Charlie Hebdo I went looking for kosher food, he called my logic amalgame (amalgam). If there is one French word that a foreigner should retain from recent events it is amalgame. The term refers to the mixing of two distinct ideas, events or situations that are brought together in order to deliberately creating confusion, typically in order to discredit an individual or group and/or to exploit an event to demonstrate one’s point of view for political advantage or to rationalize broad condemnation or hatred. Saying C’est de l’amalgame (That’s an amalgam) is a way of crying intellectual foul against someone’s argument. It’s often heard in response to someone who says that all Muslims must respond for an assassination in the name of Islam or that the relationship between Israel and Palestinians is that of all Jews and all Arabs.

Though equating purchasing kosher food with purchasing the survivor edition of Charlie Hebdo required a shift in the reflex to want the publication (and freedom of the presss, etc.) to win the day, I thought my friend wrong to call their association an amalgam. I thought it misguided to insist that this day belonged to Charlie Hebdo alone, as though saying “Je suis Charlie” the other day meant that we had all agreed that we found Charlie Hebdo funny and pertinent and worth buying, that we had committed a republican sin by not subscribing earlier. The amalgam between the creators of satire and the consumers of kosher food, I countered, was thrust upon us by the terrorists.

But they aren’t wrong to lump together the targets of their distain. All of them—satirists, Jews, police and many others—are deserving of protection. To now remember only half of the split screen of the double assaults by security forces on January 9 would be to refuse the basic facts of what had occurred or to believe that in this massacre there were some deaths more unjust than others. Some amalgams must be made. And lucky us that we can enjoy the symbolic value of Charlie Hebdo and kosher food on the same day, even if we find them both tasteless.

My friend had had a rough week preparing his own weekly magazine for publication and neither of us was up for punditry that evening. We dropped the subject as I opened the bottle of wine that he’d brought, an easy-going Côtes du Roussillon whose meaning I didn’t question.

I realized that I didn’t have any candle holders for the Sabbath candles. Then I realized that I did: cadavers, as the French call empty bottles, from a recent craft beer tasting.

I lit several candles.

I served a salad (endives, feta, sundried tomatoes, grilled peppers), followed by fresh pasta with eggplant and ricotta, not from the “World” section but from an Italian shop. Greek yoghurt, chocolate and clementines for dessert. Calvados.

The meal was mostly Italian but with a nod to what I already had in my refrigerator, along with a domestic wine imported by my guest and brandy from a war tour in Normandy—an delicious well-accompanied amalgam of sorts, with candles and cadavers to spare.

© 2015, Gary Lee Kraut

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Jewish quarters come and go, but anti-Semitism never goes out of fashion. Most recently in France—we are in 2014—there’s been a growing attraction (patent yet limited) of the “quenelle,” a down-turned Nazi salute now understood by most to be an anti-Semitic, anti-establishment gesture. It has gained favor among individuals and groups who believe that Jewish concerns, interests and history get too much airplay, in the way that some in France and elsewhere will unify in their antagonism against homosexuals, gypsies or others.

The Deportation Memorial

Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, political opponents and others were among the 200, 000 men, women and children deported from France to Nazi concentration camps between 1940 and 1944 who did not return. The French Deportation Memorial that honors their memory lies at the eastern tip of Ile de la Cité, behind Notre-Dame Cathedral.

At the back of quiet little park, steep stairs lead to a high-walled triangular courtyard where the Seine can be seen flowing toward barbed iron. A first-time visitor might think that itself is the monument before noticing a narrow passage formed by two blocks of stone leading into the memorial crypt.

Inaugurated by President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, the memorial crypt contains the Tomb of the Unknown Deportee. The remains placed in the tomb are those of an individual who died in the concentration camp of Neustadt. A long alley containing 200,000 points of light extends beyond the tomb. Triangular urns inscribed with the names of concentration camps contain earth from the camps and ashes from their crematoria. Lines of poetry inscribed on the walls speak of pain, loss and tragedy. The entrance is barred to the cells to either side the alley. We peer into these cells unable to see the dark corners, unable to fathom what suffering they might hold.

An annual ceremony is held here on the last Sunday in April. That has, since 1954, been designated as the National Day of Memory of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Deportation, which is close to the date of the Hebrew calendar on which Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, is commemorated.

The Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center

Of the 200,000 individuals memorialized at the Deportation Memorial, about 77,000 were born Jewish, and they were specifically targeted to be exterminated because of that. The majority of those Jews were killed in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Several thousand died in internment camps and some thousand others were otherwise executed or killed in France. The memorial to their memory is in the Marais, a large district (broadly the 3rd and 4th arrondissements) that had sizeable Jewish population at the outbreak of the war. The Shoah Memorial/Holocaust Center building is situated within a 10-minute walk of the Deportation Memorial to one side and rue des Rosiers to the other.

Roundups and Deportations

Following Germany’s defeat of France and the Armistice of June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern half of France and a wide swatch down the country’s Atlantic coast. With Paris occupied, the French government, having originally decamped to Bordeaux, made the spa town of Vichy its headquarter. There, on July 10, 1940 Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of WWI, was voted full governmental power, hence reference to the French government from then until the Liberation of France in 1944 as the Vichy government.

An estimated 270,000 to 300,000 Jews were living in France in the late 1930s. Within several months after France’s armistice with Germany, the policies of the German occupiers and new French laws led to Jews being progressively excluded from professional life and dispossessed of property. Jews, defined by French officials as individuals with at least two Jewish grandparents, were required to register with the local police, constituting files that would eventually be used to round up Jews for deportation.

In collaboration with Germans and on their own, the French government along with local and state French police began rounding up Jews in 1941, first primarily foreign Jews then increasingly French Jewish men. Jews were required to wear a yellow star as of June 1942. The massive and all-inclusive round-ups in the Occupied Zone would follow.

During the mass round-up (rafle in French) of July 16-17, 1942, 13,152 Jews were arrested in Paris and the Paris region. The event was exceptional not only for the number of Jews that were arrested in a single well-organized sweep but for also the fact that it embodied a clear shift in policy to the deportation of women and children along with men. Many of those arrested were corralled at the winter cycling stadium—the Vélodrome d’Hiver, commonly known as the Vél d’Hiv—that then stood just beyond the Eiffel Tower. From there they were moved to the transit camp at Drancy, northeast of the city, and then by train to Auschwitz.

Though not the only round-ups of the war period in France, those of July 1942 have come to represent the injustice and horrors of deportations throughout that period in France.

In 1995, at the site of the Vélodrome, President Jacques Chirac officially recognized on behalf of the nation France’s responsibility, under the authority of the Vichy Government and in collaboration with the Germans occupying the country, in the deportation of French Jews.

While the sculptural group shown above has been placed near the river, a memorial stands by the site of the former velodrome at 8 boulevard de Grenelle.

The Wall of the Righteous

Of the 270,000-300,000 Jews in France prior to the start of the war, nearly 75% survived by their own means, through the help of Jewish resistance organizations and/or through the assistance of non-Jewish French, through efforts both individual and collective.

For a variety of reasons, a larger percentage of French Jews escaped the Shoah than Jews from most other European countries. That partially explains why France now has the largest Jewish population in Western Europe. (Another reason for its size is the many Jews who arrived from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco as those countries gained independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s.)

Righteous Among the Nations is a title granted since 1963 by the State of Israel via the Memorial Museum of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to non-Jewish men and women who helped save Jews from persecution during the war. The names of over 3300 Righteous, whether French or acting in France, are inscribed in bronze plaques along the alley, now named  Allée des Justes (Alley of the Righteous), that borders the north side of the memorial. Inaugurated in 2006, the Wall of the Righteous also contains the name of the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a largely Protestant village whose religious leaders and villagers, some of whom are individually designated as Righteous, helped save numerous Jews. French Protestants had known periods of tremendous intolerance and murder at the hands of the Catholic majority and nobility from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

On the opposite side of the Allée des Justes can be seen a plaque indicating that more than 11,000 Jewish children were sent to the camps from France, including more than 500 from this, the 4th, arrondissement. Such plaques are now found on schools in districts throughout Paris where Jews lived. Some 6100 of those children lived in Paris. A sign facing the playground in Square du Temple, a park on the northern edge of the Marais, lists the names of 87 children (les tout-petits) from the 3rd arrondissement who weren’t yet old enough to attend school before being sent to the camps.

Entrance to the Shoah Memorial

Ten years after his speech at the site of the Vél d’Hiv, President Chirac inaugurated the Shoah Memorial and Holocaust Center on January 27, 2005, on the Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and for the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, marking that year the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Security here is attentive, humorless and direct, as at the entrance to other major Jewish sights, notably the Great Synagogue on rue de la Victoire (9th arrondissement), but one can nevertheless freely enter the memorial (if without a weapon), whereas the synagogue requires prior arrangement for those who aren’t normally affiliated with it.

The names of death camps are written on a circular memorial in the courtyard, above the memorial crypt. Along the nearby wall seven bas-reliefs (1982) by the sculptor Arbit Blatas symbolize the camps. Text on the façade of the building written in Hebrew from poet Zalman Schnoeur’s adaptation of a line from Deuteronomy 25:17 is translated by the center as follows: “Remember what Amalek did unto our Generation exterminating 600 myriad bodies and souls, in the absence of war.”

Below that is written in French the words of Justin Godard, former government minister, Honorary President of the Committee for the Unknown Jewish Martyr: “Before the unknown Jewish martyr, incline your head in piety and respect 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.”

History of the Shoah Memorial

The Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center form a single entity whose mission is “understanding the past to illuminate the future.” The building combines a museum, a documentation center and reading room, France’s largest (by number of titles) physical bookstore on the subject of the Holocaust, an auditorium for screenings, symposia, debates and presentations, offices and a memorial crypt. Though the building, as a Holocaust center, was inaugurated in 2005, the memorial itself had already existed.

Already in 1943 there was awareness among some Jews in France that evidence and testimony of their persecution would be necessary for the time when justice would be demanded. In April of that year Isaac Schneersohn invited 40 militant leaders of the various political factions in the Jewish community to his home in Grenoble, in the unoccupied zone, to set up the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation. But in September of that year the Germans entered into the unoccupied zone (referred to as the Free Zone by the Vichy government), causing Schneersohn and others to go underground as part of the Resistance. There, efforts continued to collect secret archives, including those held by the Vichy government and by the Gestapo in France.

After the war the CDJC began classifying these archives and established a publishing house to publish books and journals about the Shoah. The CDJC was soon called upon by the French government to provide evidence for the Nuremberg Trials.

Still under Schneersohn, the CDJC in 1951 sought to create a memorial to the victims of the Shoah and eventually obtained this plot of land owned by the City of Paris. Schneersohn passed away in 1969.

The Wall of Names

An estimated 78,000-80,000 Jewish men, women and children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944. Of them, some 76-77,000 did not return. (The round numbers in this article are approximate as figures vary among the most serious sources. Those given in this article are generally those presented at the center.) Past the security box at the entrance from the street, one approaches the building through the narrow passage between walls inscribed with the names and dates of birth of these individuals, listed alphabetically by year in which they were deported.

The Memorial Crypt

The building housing The Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr was inaugurated in October 1956, three years after the laying of its cornerstone, and in February 1957 ashes of victims from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Mauthausen and from the Warsaw Ghetto, placed in earth from Israel, were buried in the memorial crypt.

A Biblical quote in Hebrew on the back wall of the crypt reads: “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. Young and old, our sons and daughters were cut down by the sword.”

A map of the Warsaw Ghetto and an actual door from the Ghetto are now on the opposite wall. Off to the side, behind Plexiglas, are the “Jewish Files,” the index cards created between 1941 and 1944 under orders of the Vichy government and the will of the police department of the Paris region indicating the identification of Jews. These are the files that were used by French police in complicity with the Nazi occupier to know the identity and address of Jews to be rounded up for eventual deportation. Though present here for their association with the memorial, the files belong to the National Archives of France.

The Permanent Exhibition

The Shoah Memorial was officially listed on the register of historic buildings in 1991. But it soon became evident that of the need to enlarge the building and bring the CDJC and the Shoah Memorial together a single entity. A major transformation of the building led to its reopening in early 2005. The facades and the crypt of the original building were integrated into the new structure.

Other than to coming pay homage to the memory of victims of the Shoah, the permanent exhibition in the sub-basement museum is the most instructive aspect of the memorial and center for first-time visitors. Through photographs, texts, documents, films and recordings, the exhibition provides an excellent overview of the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and the events of the war period, followed by evidence and testimony gathered during the post-war period. While the films and recordings are in French only, the texts are in both French and English.

The center’s board of directors includes a number of well-known Jewish figures in French political, intellectual and economic life, currently among them Eric de Rothschild (president), Robert Badinter, chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim, Alain Finkielkraut, Serge Klarsfeld and Simone Veil. Among the memorial’s partners are the City of Paris, the Paris region (Ile de France), the Ministry of Education and the French train company SNCF.

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

The Shoah Memorial, 17 rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, 4th arr. Tel. 01 42 77 44 72. Metro Saint-Paul or Pont-Marie. Open Sunday to Friday 10am-6pm, until 10pm on Thursday. Closed for certain Jewish holidays as well as Jan. 1 and Dec. 25. Admission is free except for the auditorium and some educational activities. Free guided tours for individuals are given Sundays at 3pm in French and the second Sunday of each month in English.

The 7000+ titles available through the center’s bookshop are listed online at www.librairie-memorialdelashoah.org.

The Museum of Jewish Art and History, is also in the Marais at 71 rue du Temple, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Rambuteau or Hôtel de Ville. Open Monday to Friday 11am-6pm, Sunday 10am-6pm. Exhibitions open until 9pm on Wednesday. A 15-minute walk from the Shoah Memorial and also in the Marais, this museum is housed in a 17th-century mansion called the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a building occupied in 1942 by number of Jews, 13 of which died in the camps. The permanent collection shows glimpses of Jewish life in France through the centuries and mounts notable temporary exhibitions.

Related articles on France Revisited:
– Paul Niedermann: Interview with a Holocaust Survivor and Witness in France
– In Search of a Jewish Quarter:  Rue des Rosiers and the Jewish Food Court of Paris

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