In September 1939, when France declared war on Germany, the Camp des Milles interned so-called “enemy subjects,” largely meaning citizens of Germany and Austria living in France, in more than 240 camps around the country, including a former tile factory in the village of Les Milles. By the following June Les Milles was known as the camp of artist due to some 3500 artists and intellectuals being detained there. Among them was Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jewish German writer.

Born in Munich in 1884, the son of a Jewish factory owner, Feuchtwanger became a well-known writer who tried to warn the world about the dangers of Hitler and the Nazi party. As early as the 1920s he predicted many of the Nazis’ crimes in his book “Conversations with the Wandering Jew.” His book “Jud Süß” (Süss the Jew) would be distorted by the Nazis, who turned it into an anti-Semitic feature film. Heinrich Himmler had it shown to SS units and Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads about to be sent east on their murderous assignments.

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Feuchtwanger was on a book tour in the United States. There he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. While in the U.S. he learned of the confiscation of his properties in Germany and the burning of his books. The German Ambassador to the U.S. advised Feuchtwanger not to return to his homeland. He took his advice but returned to Europe. Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta settled down with other German exiles in the seaside town of Sanary-sur-Mer, between Bandol and Toulon in southern France.

“We were in paradise, against our will,” he wrote. Although his books were banned from publication in Germany, the high circulations of translations enabled Feuchtwanger to have a comparatively comfortable life in exile until the outbreak of the war.

It was then, in September 1939, that Feuchtwanger, like other Germans and Austrians living in exile in France, was first interned at the Camps des Milles. Remarking on the irony of the internment of what were essentially anti-Nazi refugees, he wrote: “the responsible authorities know perfectly well that the spies, the saboteurs, the Nazi sympathizers were to be sought quite elsewhere than among us.” Recognizing this, the authorities released Feuchtwanger after several weeks.

The Devil in France

But the war situation and the attitude of the French government changed in early 1940 Feuchtwanger was arrested and interned there a second time. In his memoir “The Devil in France” he speaks of the deplorable conditions of that internment.

Republished in English by USC (University of Southern California) Libraries in 2010, The Devil in France (subtitled “My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940”) provides an intimate account of Feuchtwanger’s thoughts, snippets of his conversations and details of his survival tactics. Although Les Milles was not a work camp, Feuchtwanger recalled how, “under the sharp command of a sergeant,” he and his fellow inmates were forced to make neatly stacked piles of bricks. The bricks would later be torn down and piled up in another place. It made him think of the verse from Exodus “in which,” he wrote, “the children of Israel are forced to bake bricks for Pharaoh of Egypt to build the treasure cities of Pithom and Raamses.” So he chanted “Pithom Raamses… Pithom–Raamses” as he mechanically tossed bricks to his neighbor.

In the memoir he tells about the tiles, the bricks, the cramped spaces, making his bed directly on the floor out of straw, setting it off with more bricks, breathing in dust until his lungs bled and dust even in their inadequate food, the boredom, the lack of privacy. When not lifting bricks, the inmates spent much of their days in the dimly lit dormitories.

In the morning, he wrote, there were long lines to go outside to a handful of filthy latrines that were controlled by Foreign Legion detainees, some of whom had fought for France for decades and were maimed. One could tip the Legionnaires to get moved up to the front of the line. The Legionnaires also ran much of the camp’s black market.

The inmates organized cultural activities in their fight against boredom and dehumanization. Feuchtwanger eloquently describes a cabaret club set up in the brick oven area of the camp, where they could mobilize their creativity and artistic talents. They called it the Catacomb, after a Berlin nightclub closed by Goebbels in the mid-1930s.

Feuchtwanger lived to write about his experiences because he managed to escape at the end of the summer of 1940, before the French began participating in the delivery of Jews to Nazi death camps. His wife Marta orchestrated his escape. At that time, he, along with other prisoners of Les Milles, had been moved to a makeshift tent camp near Nîmes. The prisoners were allowed to bathe every afternoon at a small river in the middle of the afternoon. This proved to be the perfect time of day to engineer an escape and smuggle him out disguised as an English woman and take him to Marseille.

There, Marta was assisted by the American vice consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, who was known for liberally issuing visas to help refugees, in defiance of State Department policy. Bingham arranged to have a picture of a grim and gaunt Feuchtwanger behind the barbed wires of the Milles Camp sent to America. Feuchtwanger’s publisher, Ben Huebsch of Viking Press, had friends show the picture to Eleanor Roosevelt, who made the president aware of the situation. An emergency visa was then issued, unofficially, in view of the American policy of neutrality during that period. Feuchtwanger was therefore added to a list of prominent artists and intellectuals, most wanted by Hitler and therefore in great jeopardy, to be rescued by the American Emergency Rescue Operations run by the American journalist Varian Fry.

From Marseille he undertook a dangerous journey through Spain and Portugal. Realizing that even in Portugal any delay to get on a boat to the United States could be fatal for a man wanted by the Nazis, Martha Sharp, a Unitarian minister’s wife, gave up her own berth on the Excalibur so that Feuchtwanger could sail immediately for New York City. His wife Marta obtained passage two weeks later.

Feuchtwanger was living in California and had published his memoir of his internment by the time Camp des Milles experienced its darkest days. In the summer of 1942, some 2,000 Jewish men, women and children rounded up in the southern France were interned at the Camp des Milles before deportation to Auschwitz, where they were exterminated. While the Germans never asked that children be deported, French minister Pierre Laval insisted that they be deported as well. At Les Milles this is given its full impact by the Serge Klarsfeld exhibition that commemorates the 11,400 Jewish children deported from the whole of France to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944.

Feuchtwanger died in Los Angeles in 1958. After his death, his wife Marta willed their house Villa Aurora and his extensive personal library to the University of Southern California. Villa Aurora, a historic landmark, is now an artist residence.

Visiting the Camp des Milles

On September 10, 2012, exactly seventy years after the last train convoy left from Les Milles for the Auschwitz death camp, the Memorial-Site of the Camp des Milles was opened to the public. In 2015 UNESCO launched its new Chair for Education for Citizenship, Human Sciences and Shared Memories there. The Chair focuses on research and activism centered on the history of the Holocaust, citizenship and the prevention of genocide.

The historical section: A visit to the Memorial-Site of the Camp des Milles begins with a rich and compelling collection of displays, audiovisual pieces and illustrations in French and English dedicated to understanding the historical background to the threats that escalated across Europe between 1919 and 1939, to the individual destinies of those interned and to the history of France’s Vichy government. Displays document the general history of internment camps in France under the country’s Third Republic (i.e. prior to the summer of 1940) and under the Vichy regime. It recounts in detail the history of the Milles Camps where some 10,000 people of 38 nationalities were interned during the war. It also focuses on the perpetration of the Jewish genocide on a European scale and its implementation in Les Milles.

The remembrance section: The visit continues with the remembrance area, which includes the internment quarters of what had been a tile-making factory and the makeshift cabaret as described in Feuchtwanger’s memoir. Some of the artwork created by interned artists remains visible on the walls. In this section, the guide points out the windows from which women were willing to jump rather than suffer deportation and also indicates the places where some fortunate individuals managed to hide and survive.

The reflexive section: Based on a scientific analysis of the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the Tutsi genocide, this this third section provides an understanding of the mechanisms that can lead a democracy (both the system and the gathering of individuals within that system) towards a genocide and the capacity of individuals to resist. It also explores the human behavior mechanisms operating through racism, antisemitism and xenophobia.

The Wall of Righteous Acts concludes the visit to the Camp des Milles by showing the many different ways ordinary people can carry out acts of resistance in the context of genocide through examples of the past century.

Today young people remain an important target group for the memorial-site. Alain Chouraqui, president of The Milles Camp Foundation, has written that it is “not for the visitors, especially the young, to leave overwhelmed by the darkness of the persecutions, but rather that they become aware of vigilance and resistance.”

Practical information

Camp des Milles, 40 chemin de la Badesse, 13517 Aix-en-Provence. Tel. 04 42 39 17 11. Open 10am-7pm (no tickets sold after 6pm) daily except Jan. 1, May 1, Dec. 24, 25, 31. The memorial-site suggests counting on 2½ hours for a complete visit. Audio guides are available in English. For information about guided tours in English contact the camp directly. It can be cold in the internment quarters in winter – dress warmly.

The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940 by Lion Feuchtwanger can be downloaded free of charge from the USC Libraries website. Further information about the writer and his life as an émigré in the United States can be found here.

Aix-en-Provence Tourist Office, 300 avenue Giuseppe Verdi, 13100 Aix-en-Provence.

Bus service (line 4) from the Rotonde near the Aix-en-Provence Tourist Office goes to the camp, whose station is called Gare des Milles.

© 2017

Wendy Dubreuil is a conference interpreter with a deep interest in human rights and discrimination issues.

The post Lion Feuchtwanger and the Milles Internment and Deportation Camp Near Aix-en-Provence appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

It was the synagogue’s cleaning woman, a Muslim of Moroccan origin, who called the rabbi in a panic to tell him that eight soldiers, heavily armed and carrying duffel bags, had arrived with orders to protect the synagogue. And they were hungry, having been shipped out from their base southwest France without provisions.

The previous day, in response to the terror attacks of January 7 and 9, Prime Minister Manuel Valls had made a stirring speech to the National Assembly in which he reaffirmed an earlier declaration that “without the Jews of France, France would no longer be France.”

Kehilat Gesher, a small bilingual (French-English) synagogue of 160 families, was now one of the sites where a total of more than 10,000 soldiers would be affected to “ensure the permanent protection of sensitive points and of public spaces, with priority given to Jewish schools, synagogues and mosques,” as the prime minister declared the night before.

Cohen, the founding rabbi of Kehilat Gesher, quickly left his home in the Marais to meet the men.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Pauline Bebe, Cohen’s wife, who is French, discovered that a squad had also been sent to protect the Centre Mayaan, the community center and synagogue of the Communauté Juive Libérale d’Ile de France located in the 11th arrondissement.

Rabbis Cohen and Bebe form a unique couple in Judaism in France and worldwide. They are both ordained in the Jewish movement called “Libérale” in French which corresponds to the Reform movement in the UK and the US, though for some Americans its approach might appear to be midway between Reform and Conservative. The Reform movement upholds the equality of men and women in religious practice and leadership. Reform Jews represent about 5% of the France’s Jewish population, which is estimated at 500-600,000. Most Jews in France are not affiliated with any synagogue, while the majority of those who are belong to Orthodox synagogues. The third major current of Judaism in France is the Conservative or Massorti movement.

The synagogue and the soldiers

For three months after they first arrived, squads of eight lived at Kehilat Gescher 24/7, in rotation, as at other sensitive sites. “Everyone, even a little hole in the wall synagogue like ours, had eight,” said Cohen.

After a time their presence became the new normal, but the initial weeks provided a learning experience for the rabbi, the members of the synagogue and the soldiers. The first three weeks Kahilat Gesher hosted and was guarded by a platoon from the Montauban-Toulouse area. That’s the area from which three soldiers were killed in the terrorist attacks of March 2012 that also included the murder of a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

“This group knew that the first people that Muslim extremists were killing [in France] were soldiers,” said Cohen, “so they knew they were in the line of fire. And they were trying to figure out ‘What’s the connection between Jews and soldiers?’”

What is the connection?

“The soldiers and the government represent the authority… and the Jews… are the easiest way to get a lot of bang for your buck. That’s the short answer, while there are a lot of ands, ifs and buts that I could add to that.”

(The initial interview with Rabbi Cohen for this article was conducted one week prior to the attacks of November 13, 2015 that killed 130 people in Paris.)

Though Cohen wasn’t aware of any soldiers assigned to Kehilat Gesher being of Jewish faith, the soldiers sometimes did take special part in the Saturday morning service.

“I did things during that time that I, as a foreigner, could get away with but that other rabbis, including my wife, would not even think of or do because they grew up in this culture… Every Saturday morning we have at the end of the Torah reading of our service a prayer for France, as synagogues everywhere around the world have a prayer for the government. So Saturday mornings I would ask the soldiers [who were off duty inside] if one of them wouldn’t mind reading the prayer for France. Having a guy come here in full metal jacket reading [this prayer], for the community, especially at that time period when everyone was shaken, was very moving, and extremely moving for the soldiers as well.… They would sometimes tremble when reading it.”

Some, he adds, would also sit in on one of the various classes given in French at Kehilat Gesher, discussions about the Torah, the Talmud or questions of Jewish life and ethics.

That, he said, is “at least one thing that can be pulled out of the dark days of January. Generally those who join the army tend to be more patriotic, nationalistic than most other citizens. Therefore politically the more nationalistic parties reach out to them and they’re more attracted to those parties. So to have almost 10% of the French army living in close quarters, mainly with the Jewish community, for three months… I hope that somewhere along the line those seeds will bear fruit… Everyone, in all of the communities, treated them like their own kids…”

Every Saturday afternoon 20 sushi meals were anonymously ordered for the soldiers at Kahilat Gesher. Congregants were ordering pizzas for them. A woman from the neighborhood who wasn’t a member of the synagogue knocked on the door one day and offered them a large pot of couscous, saying it was kosher.

After three month the rhythm changed and the army stood guard only whenever activities taking place. Cohen assumed that that, too, would slow down or stop as the year went on, but the rhythm continued.

“The government is in for the long-haul,” he said, “which is a good thing, I guess… That’s one thing I always point out to [those] who say ‘This is 1933 [in France], the brown shirts and Kristalnacht are around the corner.’ There are two major differences: one of them is that there is [the existence of] Israel, the other is that it’s the government that’s been taking the lead to try to protect us.”

Making Aliyah: Moving to Israel

The Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli organization operating internationally to assist those interested in moving to Israel and “to rescue Jews from countries where they are at risk,” reported for 2014 “a dramatic increase in Aliyah [the Hebrew term for immigration to Israel] from France. That year saw the arrival in Israel of 7,000 new immigrants from France, more than double the 3,400 who arrived in 2013 and triple the 1,900 who came in 2012.” That made 2014 the first year in which more immigrants came from France than from any other country. France has the largest Jewish population in Europe and the third-largest in the world after Israel and the United States.

Within days of the January attacks Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency, estimated that 15,000 French Jews could immigrate to Israel in 2015. In fact, about 7800 French Jews made Aliyah that year, according to the Jewish Agency. [Post-note: In Jan. 2017 the Jewish Agency announced that under 5000 French Jews immigrated to Israel in 2016.]

In early 2015, in the wake of anti-Semitic acts in Paris and then in Copenhagen, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Natanyahu’s call on Jews to leave France and Europe overall was widely condemned in Europe as unhelpful, even insulting. Asked a year later (May 2016) to describe Israel’s policy toward immigration from France, Israeli Ambassador Aliza Bin-Noun said that the official Israeli position was that immigration to Israel was a personal matter and that Israel would do all that it could to help those who want to establish themselves in Israel to do so. The ambassador qualified that by quoting her father: “When he heard that there was an anti-Semitic event anywhere in the world he always told me, ‘I think they deserve it because now we have a Jewish country… so if something happens to Jews in the world it’s their responsibility… Now we have a Jewish country, a country that can protect all of the Jews in the world.’”

Said Cohen: “Somebody who wants to move to Israel because they have a project and for a fuller Jewish life, I think, especially as a rabbi, that’s great, I want to help you out. Someone who’s running away because 10% of the population of France is Muslim and you’re scared is something else… It [fear] is one those things that doesn’t become the primary reason but it’s an additional reason for someone to leave.”

[Estimates of the number of people of Muslim faith or heritage in France vary from about 6 to 10% of an overall population of 66 million.]

Cohen cautions that what the numbers of those moving to Israel do not indicate is the return rate, particularly for those who leave over the age of 40, when “integration is much more difficult than when you go right after your studies.”

Furthermore, he said, “It’s very hard to discern how many people are actually leaving because of their fear of anti-Semitism [and] how many of them—especially if you’re younger and you have a degree and you haven’t been able to get a job for a long time in France…—are leaving for economic reasons. Those who have some connection to go to the United States—that’s the golden ring. But for French who do not have the American connection, if you’re Jewish, Israel is the easy place to go. Otherwise the other ambitious entrepreneurs of that age who are not Jewish and are not going to think of going to Israel tend to go to London, which is now the seventh largest ‘French’ city.”

“Economic Aliyah [from France] is very important, much more important, I think, than the anti-Semitic Aliyah,” he said. “And on top of it there’s the third element which is financial Aliyah. In the past several years… there is a huge financial drain going on in France. The highly wealthy [have moved to] London, Brussels, Luxembourg. They take the train in to work here, but they’ve established tax residencies in other countries. You have a large group of Jews doing that as well. [There are] many [Jewish] French businessmen who moved their families to Israel but come to France to work during the week. They’ve established their tax residence there but they live out their financial life here.”

In his own synagogue, he said, “I have a handful leave each year and they tend to be all in their mid to late 20s. The families that I’m aware of leaving had left over the past year or two [before the January attacks] for financial reasons.” He said that he hasn’t had any Anglo-Saxon families leave France to return home out of fear, but rather because the time of their mission in Paris was up.

Could it be that Reform Jews feel less threatened than Orthodox Jews, among which the men wear skullcaps and the children may attend Jewish schools?

“You can’t deny that there’s anti-Semitism that’s within certain aspects of society here.”

Have you seen any change in that in the more than 20 years that you’ve been in Paris?

“What has changed for me is that starting around 2000, 2001, for the first time the people in polite society who would not have said something [anti-Semitic], though they may have always thought it, they no longer felt the societal pressure to be quiet. So there’s then a loosening of tongues which then creates an atmosphere that permits things. They’ve given themselves permission to say things that they wouldn’t have said beforehand. But I don’t think the actual number of anti-Semites has necessarily changed, certainly within what are called the French ‘de souche’ [old stock French]… In a way you can say that the French are far less anti-Semitic than they’ve ever been. But within a subgroup, specifically with an Islamic subgroup of radical Islam, it’s off the charts.”

According to the American Jewish Committee, a global Jewish advocacy group that occasionally reports on public opinion surveys with regards to anti-Semitism, “Three distinct groups in France are noticeably more anti-Jewish than the overall population… The groups are supporters of the National Front party (extreme right), to a lesser extent supporters of the Left Front coalition (extreme left), and members of the Muslim community.” Surveys conducted by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League regarding anti-Semitism in Europe found “a dramatic decrease” in anti-Semitic attitudes in France between the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015, with 77 of those polled agreeing that “violence against Jews in this country affects everyone and is an attack on our way of life.” It concluded that “concern about violence against Jews increased by 20 percent in France, 31 percent in Belgium, and 33 percent in Germany.” While the ADL’s “anti-Semitism” index revealed scores that were “extremely high for Muslims,” the lowest level was recorded in France, at 49% compared to 17% percent in the population overall. The United Kingdom, for example, Muslims scored at 54% on the index compared to 17% in the overall British population.

The first few Sabbaths after the attacks of January an imam friend of the Rabbi Cohen came to every service to show his support. “He asked me if he could come and I said ‘Of course.’ I do a lot of interfaith dialogue. However, one of the things that I as well as other leaders who are involved in any sort of outreach, we’re very wary of creating problems for our interlocutor” due to a backlash in their own religious communities. In order to support the more moderate voices among Muslim leaders, he said, the Catholic Church has been helpful because “it’s less of a sin to have a dialogue with Catholics.” Catholics can then initiate interfaith dialogues with imams and “once that starts happening you can bring in the back door and start bringing in some rabbis.”

Paris’s bilingual synagogue

Tom Cohen and Pauline Bebe met when they were students in Israel in the late 1980s. Originally from Oak Grove, Oregon, near Portland, Cohen attended the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, the West Coast affiliate of the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) in New York. He then completed his seminary studies in New York while Bebe complete hers at Leo Baeck College in London. In 1990 Bebe became the first woman from continental Europe to be ordained as a rabbi since Regina Jonas was ordained in Germany in 1938. (Jonas was later assassinated at Auschwitz.) Women were ordained in the United Kingdom as early as 1975 at Leo Baeck College. Today she is the doyenne of the three female rabbis of France.

For several years Cohen and Bebe racked up high cross-Atlantic telephone bills, the both moved to Paris, to marry and to work.

In the fall of 1992 Rabbi Cohen was appointed at the synagogue on Rue Copernic (Union Libérale Israélite de France, 16th arrondissement of Paris), Paris’s oldest Reform synagogue, to second Rabbi Michael Williams, a Brit. (That synagogue was already officiated by Williams in 1980 when it was the site of a terrorist attack, the first such attack against Jews in France since WWII.)

In 1993 Cohen was approached by “four or five” bilingual (English-French) Jewish families in the western suburbs of Paris to assist them in teaching and understanding Jewish life. He described the families as comprised of Jewish women from New York married Frenchmen—“half Sephardic Jewish guys who threw the tefillin off of the boat as they entered Marseille to be more French than the French and the other half fallen Catholics.” In particular the women wanted to know how and what to transmit to their children in terms of a Jewish education. “They came up with the idea of starting a light Friday-night service in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and their friends then heard about it in Paris and also wanted to join.”

As the number of participants grew Cohen developed the structure of a formal synagogue by founding Kehilat Gesher. For a while services were held alternately in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Paris, but Rabbi Cohen soon realized that all of the growth was in Paris.

Kehilat Gesher holds services in French and English along with Hebrew prayer. Cohen himself is bilingual, as are many of the congregants. For Torah study, parents can have their children educated in either English or French.

Warm, voluble and good-humored, Cohen has developed Kehilat Gesher into a religious center that is a reflection of his own personality and of the diverse backgrounds of its members. Sixty percent of the families at Kehilat Gesher are French, while 40% are mixed French-English-speaking natives or fully English-speaking native families. The congregation brings together Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures. Most of the native English-speakers are American, while “a handful” are British and there are also other foreign nations (Dutch, Swedish, etc.). Of the English-speakers, “the Brits tend to be the more involved,” said Rabbi Cohen. “All of them have them have taken on some kind of responsibility to make the community function, not just in a user mode but also in a provider mode.” The synagogue currently has 160 member families, a “family” meaning an individual, a couple or a family with children for membership purposes.

For the past decade Kehilat Gesher has been renting space in the 17th arrondissement, near the Courcelles metro station, and has recently been looking to expand to a more permanent setting. “We’re looking to have a place of about 500m2 [5400 sq. ft] and we want to stay in the 17th because this is our historic home.”

They now have 125m2 [1350 sq. ft.] for a variety of activities, including a 40m2 multipurpose rooms where religious services are held. To accommodate services for a “lifecyle event” such as a bar- or bat-mitzvah, Kehilat Gesher must to rent an alternate space.

“We’ve reached saturation point,” said Cohen. “A lot of the French families who come to see the place love the community but can’t join because it seems like a fly-by-night operation in a storefront. I was never a brick person, I was person oriented, but I realize that bricks have their place.”

Rabbi Cohen is hoping to find a place soon and then to begin fundraising. The synagogue survives by membership and donations. Kehilat Gesher USA is a U.S.-based non-profit organization through which Americans can give to the synagogue. Kehilat Gesher also participates with Rabbi Bebe’s synagogue in the Fondation Maayan, which enables tax deductions for donations.

Centre Maayan

While Rabbi Cohen was developing Kehilat Gesher in the mid-90s, Rabbi Bebe was created her own synagogue, the Communauté juive libérale (CJL) Ile de France, which she founded in 1995. Formerly housed in a space near Place de Cliché similar to Kehilat Gesher’s today, the CJL now occupies a large space in the 11th arrondissement that Bebe dubbed the Centre Maayan (Maayan means source of water in Hebrew). With the move membership quickly grew from 170 families to 400 families, an evolution that Cohen hopes to emulate when Kehilat Gesher moves to a large space. Bebe is fluent is English, as Cohen is in French, and while some native English-speakers and bilingual families do attend CJL—and visitors are welcome—the services and instruction are in French, with French and Hebrew prayer.

Bebe’s synagogue is a luminous space with light beige wood seating in a semi-circle around the bema, as the raised podium on which the rabbi stands is called. A tree bearing colorful leaves decorates the ark, the ornamental closet where the torahs are kept. A playful chandelier of dancing metal and colored glass lightens the area around it. Bebe stands at a podium on which a fabric is embroidered with curving stems in flower.

On the Friday after the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks that killed 130 people and wounded many others, about an equal number of congregants were in attendance, filling about half the room. About one quarter of the women and girls wear skullcaps; nearly all of the men do.

A piano by the podium, played by an elderly congregant, accompanies the chanting during the service. There is warmth to the service but not exuberance. The banter between the congregants appears to be more restrained than that at Rabbi Cohen’s synagogue across the city, the reflection of both cultural differences and the approaches of each rabbi.

The Centre Maayan is located near the offices of Charlie Hebdo that were attacked on January 7 and near the Bataclan concert hall attacked on Nov. 13. During the Charlie Hebdo attack a Muslim policeman named Ahmed Merabet was murdered on the sidewalk at the corner near the synagogue. In her sermon after the November attack, Bebe recalled Merabet’s smile, familiar to her since would pass him frequently on her way to and from the synagogue. She reminded the congregation that one can no longer say that the targets are others. In their hatred of those who don’t resemble them, the assassins see numbers, not people, she said. She called these acts attacks on humanity and concludes that in the simple act of having coffee on the café terrace, the cup itself could now be seen as a sign of humanity that the terrorists would deny.

Together, Cohen and Bebe, parents of four children ages 12 to 20, created a Jewish summer camp in 2014. In 2015 they very quickly attained their limit of 70 children, ages 8 to 16. In 2016 they expanded to allow in 102 children with a staff of about 30. Several dozen children had to be refused for lack of space.

While that increase undoubtedly reflects the quality of the offer, Cohen said that it is also shows that terrorism in France and anti-Semitic attacks in general have not dampened the desire for French Jews to live as Jews in France.

Given the immediate success of the summer camp, why didn’t they bring their two fledgling communities together 20 years ago as they were both getting started?

There is some joining of forces between of the couples’ synagogues with special events, concerts, teaching, but Cohen cites three reasons for never wanting to create a common synagogue: First, they didn’t want the community to get in the way of their couple. Second, it’s important that anyone who joins his wife’s community has to know that their rabbi is a woman; otherwise, he said, there’s the risk that some would see the male rabbi as a kind of superior by virtue of being male. Third, “my wife wouldn’t like my services and I wouldn’t like her services. We have different styles, but that’s okay, we joke about it.”

Madame Le Rabbin and Monsieur La Rabbine

In French un rabbin is rabbi and une rabbine is a rabbi’s wife. So while Pauline Bebe is une rabbine by virtue of being Rabbi Cohen’s wife, she also un rabbin in her own right. As France’s first female rabbi she felt it her prerogative to decide how she should be addressed as a rabbi. Wishing to be addressed by the title rather than the person, she therefore elected to be called Madame le Rabbin.

Meanwhile, Tom Cohen, as the first husband of a female rabbi in France, felt it his prerogative (“me, who bastardizes the French language all the time”) to decide what the term in French for that would be. “I decided on the same logic, so while in my synagogue I’m Monsieur le Rabbin, when I’m in her synagogue just as her husband I’m Monsieur la Rabbine. It’s my little contribution to France.”

Not so sure the Académie Française would agree.

* * *

Both Kehilat Gescher and Centre Maayan welcome visitors wishing to attend services. For security reasons, it’s advisable to call or write first to let them know that you’d like to attend on a given day.

Kehilat Gesher
Rabbi Tom Cohen
7 Rue Léon Cogniet, 75017 Paris
Telephone: 09 53 18 90 86

Communauté juive libérale Ile de France at the Centre Maayan
Rabbi Pauline Bebe
10 Rue Moufle, 75011 Paris
Telephone: 01 55 28 83 84

© 2016, Gary Lee Kraut

An earlier, shorter version of this article appeared in The Connexion in January 2016.

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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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Kraut will be exploring France from five different angles during his upcoming lectures. He’ll be speaking about American war memories in France, with an emphasis on Normandy, at the Alliance Française de Doylestown, PA (in French) on Feb. 18 and the Alliance Française de Washington, D.C. (in English) on Feb. 25; about culinary travel in Paris at the public libraries in Lambertville, NJ on Feb. 20 and Yardley, PA on Feb. 21; about Jewish travel in Paris at the Lawrence, NJ Public Library on Feb. 19; about travel and travel writing beyond the clichés at Bucks County Community College (Newtown, PA) on Feb. 16, and about cultural heritage and preservation at The College of New Jersey on March 2 .

In addition to his upcoming lectures, Kraut will also be meeting with travel agents, individual travelers and Francophile groups discuss their concerns about and interest in travel to France.

Gary Lee Kraut is the author of five guidebooks and hundreds of articles about France. He is the founding editor of France Revisited www.francerevisited.com, a premier web magazine exploring life in Paris and travel in France. This month France Revisited received the North American Travel Journalists Association’s Silver Award as first runner-up in NATJA’s annual Best Online Travel Magazine competition. Kraut also received a Silver Award in the Best Culinary Travel Article category for a series about the Ardennes region of France. Last year he received NATJA’s Gold Award in the Culinary Travel Article category for an article about France’s Drôme region.

As a travel consultant and private guide, he has worked with a wide array of individuals, including a U.S. senator, a Hollywood actress, a best-selling author, top-flight travel agents, corporate presidents and many curious travelers from across the U.S. and from a half-dozen other countries.

Kraut’s area lecture schedule is as follows. All lectures are open to the public.

Travel and Travel Writing in France Beyond the Clichés
Date: Monday, February 16 at 11am.
Address: Bucks County Community College, 275 Swamp Rd. Newtown, PA 18940. The lecture will take place in the Gallagher room on the second floor of the Rollins Building.
Info: Free. Those not affiliated with the BCCC community are welcome to attend but should first send an e-mail to Theresa.Montagna@bucks.edu or call the Language and Literature Dept. at 215.968.8103 to let them know that they’re coming.

Description: “The clichés of Paris and of France are wonderful,” says Gary Lee Kraut, “but our most rewarding travels are those in which we develop a personal connection with our destination.”

Using insights, experiences and anecdotes from his work in travel and tourism in France over the past 25 years, Kraut will reveal how travel and travel writing are enriched by seeking those connections and by the surprises found along the way. He’ll speak about his own evolution over the years from a tenderfoot journalist working for a suburban New York paper to a top American specialist on travel in France, discuss the magic of “the perfect travel moment,” and provide useful tips on how and where to look.

***

American War Memories in France: Exploring the WWII sites of Normandy and the WWI sites of northern and eastern France
Dates: Wednesday, February 18 at 9:45am in Doylestown, PA (in French) and Wednesday, February 25 at 7pm in Washington, DC (in English
Address 1: Feb. 18: Alliance Française de Doylestown, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 301 North Main Street, Doylestown, PA 18901.
Address 2: Feb. 25: Alliance Française de Washington, DC, 2142 Wyoming Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20008. Tel. 202-234-7911.

Description: An illustrated lecture that examines American WWII war sites in Normandy and WWI sites in northern and eastern France and various approaches to visiting them. Along with a survey of a variety of sites and museums and an analysis of the future of the Normandy Landing Zone, Kraut will tell about some of the fascinating people he’s met during his work as a travel writer and travel specialist, from a brandy producer on a historic farm near Omaha Beach to encounters with the children of WWII veterans and with travelers who were unexpectedly and indelibly touched by what they experienced.

In Nov. 2014, at the end of the commemorative year of the 70th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy, Kraut organized and moderated on behalf of France’s Heritage Journalist Association a round-table discussion at Paris’s International Heritage Fair about the future of the Normandy Landing Zone.

***

Jewish Travel in Paris
Date: Thursday, February 19 at 7pm
Address: Lawrence Public Library, 2751 Brunswick Pike, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648. 609-989-6920
Info: Free and open to the public. Registration is suggested by calling 609-989-6928.

Description: “Jewish travelers invariably ask me about anti-Semitism in France but rarely set out to meet French Jews or learn about French Jewish history beyond anti-Semitism when in Paris,” says Gary Lee Kraut. “The effect is a skewed view of Jewish life in Paris. Without denying or apologizing for anti-Semitism, I want to show travelers and armchair travelers that Paris is an extraordinary place to explore Jewish history and contemporary Judaism in Europe.”

In this illustrated lecture Kraut will examine the history of Jews and Judaism in France as seen through various sights and neighborhoods that can be visited in Paris, covering medieval Paris, the emancipation of Jews during the French Revolution, financial and political success in the 19th century, Askhenazic and Sephardic immigration, the Dreyfus Affair, artists of the 1920s, the German Occupation and the Vichy Government, and recent events. He’ll also discuss questions of the identity that Americans and in particular American Jews carry with them when traveling abroad.

***

Culinary Explorations in Paris: A Delicious Bite of Historical and Contemporary Gastronomy in the French Capital
Dates: Friday, February 20 at 7pm at the Lambertville (NJ) Free Public Library and Saturday, February 21 at 2pm at the Yardley-Makefield (PA) Public Library.
Address 1: Feb. 20, Lambertville Free Public Library, 6 Lilly Street, Lambertville, NJ 08530. For further information call the library at 609-397-0275.
Address 2: Feb. 21, Yardley-Makefield Public Library, 1080 Edgewood Road, Yardley, PA 19067. Tel. 215-493-9020.
Both events are free and open to the public.

Description: Gary Lee Kraut treats foodies, gastronomies, bons vivants and simply hungry travelers to a tasteful exploration of food and drink in the great culinary city of Paris. He will examine the history of markets and gastronomy in Paris, describe the development of French cuisine as we know it, explain the interest of experiencing the various types of eating and drinking establishments in Paris, and give tips on how to enjoy culinary travels today in Paris and beyond.

***

Got Heritage? Understanding and Exploring Patrimoine and Preservation in France
Date: Monday, March 2 at 7pm.
Address: The College of New Jersey, in the auditorium of the college library. 2000 Pennington Rd, Ewing Township, NJ 08618. Tel. 609-771-2131
Patrimoine is translated into English as heritage yet patrimoine is used in French in ways that are much deeper and more complex than our use of the word heritage. This lecture explores the notion of patrimoine that is so deeply engrained in the consciousness of the French that it is applied to everything from cathedrals to chateaux to old mills to cuisine to wine culture to craftsmanship to horseback riding and much more. Gary Lee Kraut will explain the scope of patrimoine and reveal through anecdotes and other examples the ways in which he encounters patrimoine through his work as a travel writer and journalist and the wonderful and varied ways in which travelers can come into contact with patrimoine throughout in France. In November 2012 Gary became the first foreign journalist to be elected to the board of France’s Association des journalistes du patrimoine (the Association of Heritage Journalists).

***

Private consulting: During his stay in the area, Kraut will also be meeting with individuals and travel agents to discuss their interests and concerns about travel in France. For more information contact Gary Lee Kraut directly at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

###

Media Contact
Beth Brody, Brody PR
609-397-3737
beth [at] brodypr.com

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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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On Thursday my mother called again to say that I shouldn’t leave the apartment until they caught the terrorists. “And once they do,” she said, “you should get on the next plane home to New Jersey.”

On Friday afternoon my mother didn’t call even though there were two hostage situations, one targeting Jews.

So I called her. I said, “Mom, I hope you aren’t still worried about me.”

“I’m not worried,” she said, “I know you don’t keep kosher.”

* * *

I’ve made a cartoon to illustrate my story.

© 2015, Gary Lee Kraut

For another motherism see On Being the Press.

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Paris – In a year during which the French calendar is highlighted with festivities and commemorations surrounding the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of France, 1944—from D-Day (June 6) to the Liberation of Paris (Aug. 25) to the Liberation of Strasbourg (Nov. 23)—the reopening of the Medem Yiddish Library 70 years ago this week, on October 14, 1944, was noted by few.

The date nevertheless resonates as a marker of the return of Jews from hiding in France and their first steps toward reclaiming an identity and a language that Nazism and its allies, including in France, sought to wipe out.

Though relatively small and discreet compared to the world’s major Yiddish centers in New York and in Israel, the Medem Library’s 30,000 volumes (of which 20,000 are in Yiddish) and 7500 recordings, along with the classes, workshops and events of the Paris Yiddish Center (together with the library they form a single entity) make this the largest Yiddish cultural center in Europe.

In 1939, at the outset of the Second World War, it was common to hear Yiddish in certain quarters of Paris, particularly in the 3rd, 4th, 10th and 11th arrondissements. Yiddish, the language that most unified European Jewry before the Holocaust, had been spoken among some families and communities in Paris since the liberating effect of the French Revolution began drawing Jews to the French capital. Its presence was increasingly seen and heard in the northeast quadrant of Paris after 1880s, when greater waves of Jewish immigration began arriving from the east, waves that would also reach the shores of North America.

Over coffee and chocolate rugelach with members of the administration and the staff in the center’s little café in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, Gilles Rozier, author, translator from Yiddish and the Medem Library’s director from 1994 until June 2014, outlined the history of the library and cultural center.

At the time of its founding in 1929, during the golden age of Yiddish artistic and literary creation and publication, the Medem Library was just one of a number of Yiddish libraries and centers in Paris. Each Jewish political party or religious movement, Rozier explained, had its own library which also served as a form of social and cultural center, a gathering place where there was often a soup kitchen for those in need. Neither Zionist nor religious, the Medem was created as the library of the Bund movement, a secular Jewish socialist movement that had developed in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and spread out from there, eventually brought to Paris by immigrants fleeing pogroms and unrest in Eastern Europe. The library was named for Vladamir Medem, one Bundism’s major theorists.

Though now officially apolitical, the Medem Library and Maison de la Culture Yiddish (or Paris Yiddish Center as it’s officially called in English) as an institution remains distinctly secular. It’s even open on Saturday, though closed on Friday.

Foreign Jews in France, already targets of anti-Semitism and anti-immigration sentiment during the economic downturn of the 1930s, were increasingly treated, legally, as outcasts once the German Occupation began in 1940, at which time the rights of French Jews were also progressively diminished. Two years later, both foreign and French Jews were being deported to concentration camps. Authorities closed the Medem Library in 1943 but not before many of its books had been hidden in the basement of the building that then housed the Medem Library at 110 rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais. About 76,000 of the 270-300,000 Jews living in France before the war were killed between 1940 and 1945.

Following the Liberation of Paris from German Occupation and the removal of the Vichy Government, the Medem Library reopened on October 14, 1944. It was a small but significant step in a return to normalcy for Jews in the capital.

The number of Yiddish speakers in Paris after the war nevertheless continued to wane. Pogroms in the Soviet Union, particularly in 1956 and 1968, saw a small influx of Jewish immigrants who brought along their personal libraries, including books in Yiddish, eventually resulting in an expansion of the Medem and other libraries then still in existence. Yet the number of Yiddish-speakers was in steep decline as younger generations no long learned the language of their parents or grandparents. During the same period, the arrival of Sephardic Jews from territories formerly controlled by France in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) meant that Yiddish, historically spoken by the Ashkenazi, was no longer the primary shared language of new Jewish arrivals in continental France.

That might have spelled the end of the Medem as a gathering place, as it did for other Yiddish libraries, but the 1970s brought with them an awareness of and desire to maintain contact with one’s roots. What was true for Breton and Basque, the languages and cultures of Brittany and Basque Country, respectively, was also true of Yiddish. Roots for Jews may also mean an attachment to prayer/the synagogue and/or to Zionism, but in the case of the Medem Library, one of whose pillars remained secularism, it was the language of pre-war European Jewry that brought people together. By the 1980s, with Yiddish classes in full swing, the Medem Library was becoming more a research library than a popular library.

By the 1990s, as other Yiddish libraries and institutions closed and publications ceased, the Medem was receiving some of their collections along with collections of citizens no longer capable of reading their parents’ or grandparents’ books.

Moved to its current location, it was less the books themselves that kept the Medem Library alive than the emphasis on learning Yiddish and the enjoyment and understanding of Yiddish culture (particularly klezmer, theater, song and cooking)—in short, on transmitting Yiddish heritage. Since 2002 the center has been called Maison de la Culture Yiddish – Bibliothèque Medem.

Asked if the center was associated with the Association for the Promotion of Foreign Languages in France, Fanny Barbaray, the center’s president, said that Yiddish couldn’t be considered a foreign language but was rather a “language of France” more comparable to Breton and Basque.

In the 85 years since its creation in 1929, the Medem Library has only had four directors: Kiva Vaisbrot, one of its founders, who assumed the position until 1979, Yitskhok Niborski, director from 1979 to 1994, Rozier, director from 1994 to June of this year, and Tal Hever-Chybowski, director since September.

The House of Yiddish Culture and Medem Library occupy 7000 square feet of the ground floor and basement of a building in the 10th arrondissement (near a nice little indoor food market). Only the ground floor is open to the public. Most of the books, recordings and documents are stored the basement, available for retrieval by the Medem’s librarian, Natalia Krynicka. A hallway exhibition space, three classrooms and a small café are open to the public, as are the reading room with membership to the library, the classroom for those registered and an 80-seat room where cultural activities and events are held.

Along with Yiddish classes for all levels, the center holds klezmer, dance, choral, theater and cooking workshops and has a choral group as well as programing for children. Concerts, readings, encounters with authors and film projections also take place. While Jews make up the vast majority of those taking Yiddish classes, Barbaray noted that there are a significant number of non-Jews in the klezmer workshops.

While visitors may encounter Yiddish speakers at any time at the center, its little Tshaynik Café especially becomes a Yiddish-speaking coffee klatch on Thursday from 2:30 to 4:30pm.

In addition to income derived though classes, workshops and membership, the center receives subsidies from the Paris region, DRAC Ile-de-France (a regional department of cultural affairs), the City of Paris, the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, the National Book Center, the Rothschild Foundation, the Rachel Ajzen and Léon Iagolnitzer Foundation, the L.A. Pincus Fund for Jewish Education in the Diaspora and the Unified Jewish Social Fund. The New York-based American Friends of the Medem Library also supports the center’s activities.

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

Maison de la culture Yiddish – Bibilothèque Medem, 29 rue du Château-d’Eau, 10 arrondissement. www.yiddishweb.com. Tel. 01 47 00 14 00. Contact: mcy@yiddishweb.com. Metro République, Jacques-Bonsergent, Château-d’Eau.

Open Mon., Tues., Thurs. 1:30-6:30pm, Wed. and Sat. 2-5pm. Closed Friday, Sunday, French holidays and Yom Kippur.

For other articles about Jewish Paris on France Revisited see the March 2014 issue.

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Last November I was designing an issue of France Revisited by gathering together an assortment articles and stories about Jews, Jewish sights and Jewish history, particularly in Paris. I thought I’d call it the Hanukkah Issue. That was to be followed by a Christmas/New Year Issue before I would head off on my East Coast lecture tour in January and February.

But then the parties started—the cocktail events, the tapas evenings, the teatime happenings, the association dinners, the afternoon interludes, the “I’m only in town for a couple of days” pleas, the holiday celebrations—and before I knew it Christmas trees littered the sidewalks of Paris, New Year wishes came and went, and then I was on the road in the U.S..

There, I plotted my return, considering material that arrived from contributors and other texts that I might write. Should I transform the planned Hanukkah issue into an Semitic Food Issue, a WWII Issue, an If I Were A Rich Man Issue, an Evolution of the Marais Issue? – for I had articles on all those subjects and more.

But our first ideas are often the best, and a look at the articles I had on hand led me back to the Hanukkah Issue – except that the candles have long disappeared. So let’s get down to basics and call this issue by its rightful name: The Jewish Issue.

Here are the 9 articles, interviews and stories that comprise France Revisited’s March Jewish Issue

1. Love and Latkes. Canadian humorist Melinda Mayor, the Menschette of Montmartre, sent this piece about the trials of being a latke-lover in Paris. Melinda has previous contributed a piece about the trials of motherhood in Paris.

2. Passover and the 11th plague. New York writer and filmmaker Max Kutner tells of his first Passover in Paris and an encounter with the 11th plague.

Two articles about wealthy Jewish banking families that have left their mark on Paris:
3. The Rothschilds of the 19th century: A Riches to Riches Story.

4.  The Nissim de Camondo Museum: A Glory and the Tragedy

Views, one personal, one collective, of WWII deportations and the Holocaust
5. An exclusive interview with Paul Niedermann, a Holocaust survivor, currently living just outside of Paris. His extraordinary story is told though a text and interview by Janet Hulstrand. Janet, you may recall, previously introduced readers to American poet James Emanuel.

6. The Deportation Memorial and The Shoah Memorial. A look at two memorials that merit a place on the list of every traveler, whether Jewish or not.

7. In search of a Jewish Quarter: Rue des Rosiers, the Marais and the Jewish Food Court of Paris.

8. Noshing in Nice: Bread and the Bagel. The ever-perceptive Daniele Thomas Easton went looking bread in Nice and came home with bagels. Readers may recall Daniele’s review of the movie Sarah’s Key.

You might also want to return to an older editorial about anti-Semitism and the traveler.

Read them all, learn, discover, travel, comment, enjoy!

Gary

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* * *

Adidas, Kookai, Minelli, Annick Goutal, Fred Perry, The Kooples, Kusmi Tea. Does that sound like the making of “the Jewish Quarter” to you? It doesn’t to me either, but those are among the signs—along with “falafel, 5€50”—that one now finds on rue des Rosiers, the 1000-foot long street in the Marais that was once a main artery of Yiddishkeit in Paris.

Even well into the 1970s a visitor, few as they were, might have peered into storefront or observed local residents gathering in the street or returning from work and sensed a neighborhood, a community, whose lifestyle and traditions were visible, alive and collective, whether Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Parisian.

Now, however, the tradition most followed on rue des Rosiers is that of a shopping mall, with a Jewish-theme food court to one end and familiar international clothing brands to the other. It can be hard to see the history for the falafels.

Jews were known to have lived on the City Island in the 6th century and later on the Left Bank, and records indicate their presence in the Marais by the 13th century. Nevertheless, due to successive expulsions and limitations on the activities of Jews, notably in the 14th century, there were in fact relatively few Jews in Paris at all between the 15th century and 18th century, when Jews began trickling back. Nevertheless, due to successive expulsions and limitations on the activities of Jews, notably in the 14th century, there were in fact relatively few Jews in Paris at all between the 15th century and 18th century, when Jews began trickling back. Still, it’s unlikely that there were any Jews in the Marais when, in 1791, during the Revolution, France became the first European country to grand Jews full rights of citizenship. By the early 1800s Jewish presence in the Marais was well established. Jewish arrivals in the quarter, and throughout Paris, took on greater amplitude in the second half of the 19th century, with large movement of Jews from Alsace and Lorraine, where more than half of the Jews of France had lived. Others arrived from Eastern Europe (Romania, Austria-Hungary, Russia), particularly between 1881 and 1914, in the same pogrom-fleeing waves that reached American shores, and Jews continued to arrive in the Paris region into the 1930s.

The Marais thus became home to a grouping of diverse Jewish communities that included Alsatian, Russian, Polish and other Ashkenazic traditions, along with Portuguese and Spanish Sephardic traditions, then in the minority here. In the initial decades of the 20th century one could therefore easily believe that the center of the Marais, comprising large swaths of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, was Paris’s “Jewish quarter,” though there were in fact mostly non-Jews living throughout this working-class area, much of it very run down.

During the German Occupation of 1940 to 1944 the French police certainly knew how to distinguish a Jewish address from a non-Jewish address; they had identity files, now visible at by the Shoah Memorial, indicating with a large J (for juif) which were Jews. The massive round-up of Jews throughout the Paris region in July 1942, followed by mass deportations to the death camps, removed the “Jewish” from any sense that this was “a Jewish quarter.”

After the war some of those who had managed to flee in time and some of the few who survived the camps returned to the Marais, where, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were joined by Sephardic Jews arriving from North Africa as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco gained independence from France. Though the Jewish presence in the Marais was dramatically reduced compared with the pre-war years (most Jews arriving from North Africa settled in other quarters or in the suburbs), rue des Rosiers and surroundings still visibly formed a Jewish neighborhood.

And now? Are travelers correct in thinking when coming to rue des Rosiers today that they are actually visiting “the Jewish quarter”? Is the presence of Semitic fast food and a few Judaica shops a reflection of a vibrant local community or of successful ethnic marketing or of a combination of the two?

Let’s take a look at what’s here.

Clearly there are Parisian Jews around—clearly, that is, if you walk by one of the active synagogues and religious schools just off rue des Rosiers or look into a kosher butcher shop or one of the less tourist-directed bakeries or visit on a Jewish holiday. A Jewish vocational school still operates at 4 bis rue des Rosiers. On Sundays cliques of Jewish adolescents from throughout Paris gather on the street, though they can be lost in crowd of other visitors, for every Sunday is a non-religious holiday in the Marais and the occasion for all comers to celebrate the pleasures of a stroll in the city.

Otherwise one is more likely to catch a glimpse not of neighborhood life today but of the neighborhood that is no longer here: The façade of the old  baths (closed in 1989); a plaque indicating that an attack was carried out against Jewish targets by a Palestinian terror cell on August 9, 1982 at the restaurant Jo Goldenberg , killing 6 and wounding 22 (the space is now occupied by a clothing shop); a sign in the middle of the street stating that this was the Pletzl or little square, the crossroads of the old urban Jewish village (in 1900), and signs here and on neighboring streets (rue des Ecouffes, rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais) telling of deportations to death camps.

Synagogues of the Marais

Attesting to the centuries-old presence of Jews in the Marais, specifically the former parish of Saint Gervais, rue Ferdinand-Duval came to be called rue des Juifs (Street of the Jews) in the late Middle Ages. It was briefly a closed street, though not a ghetto per se since Jews also lived elsewhere in the city. An unsuspecting visitor is unlikely to walk up that little street today thinking that it might ever have been “a Jewish street,” until arriving at its northern end, where it spills into rue des Rosiers. You’ll find more by going one parallel street over in either direction, to rue Pavée or to rue des Ecouffes, where the neighborhood’s Jewish religiosity is more readily visible.

For security reasons, you’ll have to settle for an outer view of the Art Nouveau synagogue at 10 rue Pavée and the religious school across the street. The Pavée Synagogue (the synagogues in Paris are generally referred to by the street on which they’re located) was built in 1913 for the Union of Communities (Agoudas Hakehilos), largely comprised of Orthodox Jews of Russian origin. This high, narrow synagogue was designed by Hector Guimard, the architect famous for designing the entrances to the first Paris metro stations. The Pavée Synagogue, the only religious building to his credit, is less exuberantly Art Nouveau than the metro work, but the rising curves are undeniably his. It was dynamited on the eve of Yom Kippur 1941 by French Nazi sympathizers at the same time as several other synagogues in Paris. Guimard wasn’t Jewish but was married to a Jew—an American at that. Already in 1938 Guimard and his wife had fled Paris at the specter of war and moved to New York City, where he died in 1942. The Pavee Synagogue was restored after the war and is now listed as a Historical Monument. The building also houses aid services for the Orthodox community.

With a kind word and perhaps a small donation, visitors may be able to enter one of the smaller synagogues just off rue des Rosiers on rue des Ecouffes.

The largest synagogue in the Marais is at the district’s eastern edge, on rue des Tournelles, between Place de la Bastille and Place des Vosges. The Tournelles Synagogue, also listed as a Historical Monument, isn’t open for impromptu visits. Those interested in visiting this beautiful structure, built 1867-1876 with Gustave Eiffel’s company involved in the creation of its metallic skeleton, can contact the synagogue in advance to request permission (Synagogue de la rue des Tournelles, 21 bis rue des Tournelles, 75004 Paris). The Tournelles Synagogue backs up to the Vosges Synagogue whose entrance is at 14 place des Vosges. During the Jewish harvest-time holiday of Sukkot passersby will see a hut or sukkah installed on the balcony above the arcade on the square. There’s another handsome synagogue, built in the 1850s, in the northern part of the Marais, at 5 Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth. Taken together, these synagogues attest to the diverse community of Jews had spread throughout the Marais by the end of the 19th century, a century that saw the number of Jews in Paris increase six- or seven-fold. Many more would arrive in the following decades

Neither Rue des Rosiers nor any other area of the Marais was a closed ghetto, though portions might be considered a ghetto in the sense of being extremely run down. Jews were clearly a sizable presence in the Marais by the end of the 19th century, their numbers continuing to climb, however Jews lived throughout Paris in varying density. Rue de la Roquette (past the Bastille just east of the Marais) and Belleville were also had noticeably dense Jewish populations. While some who had distinguished themselves on the social ladder remained in the Marais, others preferred to live in the city’s upscale quarters, such as near the boulevards and quarters being modernized by Haussmann’s transformations of Paris. (Read about the Rothchild family here and the de Camondo family here.)

Wealth in the Marais

Even when Jews returned to the Marais after the war the strong Jewish presence had existed on the southern side of rue de Rivoli and rue Saint-Antoine was, by the late 1940s, largely absent; the homes of French and foreign Jews and non-Jews had been expropriated for the purposes of rehabilitating an “insalubrious” zone. Little by little the Marais lost its craftsmen and its peddlers as it became home to the middle class and to government projects. Yiddish, so frequently heard and read in the Marais prior to the war, had largely disappeared by the end of the 1950s. Another accent arose, that of Sephardic Jews arriving in numbers from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Sephardic rituals replace Ashkenasic rituals in certain synagogues, notably the synagogue on rue des Tournelles that was split in two to accommodate the distinct ritual interests of the Marais. On rue des Rosiers and nearby streets the neighborhood’s Jewish presence remained clear in the cafés and restaurants, local grocers and shops, with some now preferring couscous and bricks over herring and latkes. But the Marais as a whole was on the way upscale. “The Marais” wasn’t yet a call to stroll and shop, to see and be seen, but by the 1980s public funding was pouring into the area to restore its noble historical buildings—the 17th-century mansions and the town houses on Place des Vosges—and poverty, the hallmark of pre-war Jews in the Marais, no longer had a place here; the working class had been pushed to the edge of the city and into the suburbs. The Picasso Museum opened in one of those mansions in 1985, a turning point in terms of the neighborhoods visibility to visitors to Paris. The decade witnessed an acceleration of a transformation of the district’s local population, in the use of its storefronts and in the way in which the Marais was viewed from outside the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. Visitors from elsewhere in Paris and from abroad began to arrive. Gay bars and businesses opened just west of rue des Rosiers and within a few block of rue des Archives.

With rising real estate prices and an increasing number of visitors through the 1990s, shops began catering to clients from beyond the neighborhood. Rue des Rosiers, the remaining portion of the Marais to stake a claim to being the Pletzl—the ever shifting center of “the Jewish Quarter—, once again began to lose its local Jewish identity, though this time without anyone being murdered. Briefly Paris had the distinction of having side by side a Jewish village by day and a gay village by night. That held for about a decade, but as the Marais gained in desirability for increasingly upscale residents and visitors, any sense of neighborhood anywhere in the district largely evaporated.

Of course, Addidas, Kookai and Fred Perry shops on rue des Rosiers can be Jewish operated, as can the real estate on rue des Rosiers, but only foreign Jewish visitors and native anti-Semites consider this a Jewish quarter anymore. Similarly, only visiting LGBTQ individuals and French homophobes consider the area around rue des Archives a gay quarter. Otherwise, visitors are unlikely to have any idea who actually lives in these areas.

The 2000s saw the arrival of something new on rue des Rosiers and perpendicular streets, a new kind of Diaspora. This time it wasn’t a wave of Jewish immigrants arriving but of Jewish recipes, from New York—deli fare, pastrami sandwiches and the like. Oh, there had been pastrami sold here before, but the new deli restaurants marked the transformation of this small portion of the Marais into a Jewish-theme food court.

Though regrettable for those expecting to be visiting a Jewish enclave and a local community, this is simply part of the evolution of the city, just one of many formerly distinct neighborhoods that have been transformed by market forces in recent decades. The neighborhoods of Paris can still be distinguished by architecture, monuments, museums and history, but they are increasingly homogenous with regards to populations living and visiting there.

Wealth is the historical feature that the central Marais most recalls. After all, nobility and financiers began buying up lots here in the second half of the 16th century, and during the 17th century this became the most fashionable quarter of Paris thanks to the construction of Place des Vosges and of dozens of noble mansions. That was before there was a significant Jewish population here. It was the downfall of French nobility during the Revolution that gave Jews the freedom and elbow room to increase in numbers in the Marais. It was persecution elsewhere, hope for a better life and a need for community that caused the number of Jews in the Marais to swell in the late 19th century. It was also sense of security, hope and community (along with fun) that led to the opening of gay bars and businesses nearby in the late 20th century. The Marais was less desirable for business ventures then. Now, 400 years after the royal inauguration of Places des Vosges, the re-establishment of the Marais as a prized destination and residential area is a sign not such much that it has lost its Jewishness as that it has regained its lettres de noblesse—at least de bourgeoisie.

The Jewish Food Court

French and foreign visitors from beyond the quarter now frequent rue des Rosiers primarily for the shopping and the falafels—falafels, enjoyable as they may be, aren’t a reflection of local community or agriculture or known-how but of what visitors are happy to purchase. Hungry visitors will line up at the falafel window at L’As du Falafel as though the several other similar stands on the street had all failed their latest health test or lost the recipe for frying chickpea balls and slicing cabbage. The devotion to queuing there, particularly on Sunday, is partially due to the perverse lingering effect of an old article in the New York Times, partially due to the hawkers out front (once you’ve paid you’re stuck waiting), partially due to the fact that it’s kosher, whatever the latter may mean to the vast majority of those in line. As to quality, if you’re a serious student of fried chickpea balls and sliced cabbage in Paris then you should try them all. But if you simply want to eat a falafel pita sandwich any stand will suffice.

The street’s other hotspot is Chez Marianne, which takes its French republicanism seriously enough to present itself as French first, Jewish second. Chez Marianne, at the corner of rue des Rosiers and rue de l’Hospitalières Saint-Gervais, serves all kinds of delicious Mediterranean mush (eggplant, hummus, tzatziki, tarama, tapenade, etc.) as well as falafel, so there’s something for everyone. It isn’t kosher and so is open daily noon to 11pm. There are other choices in the area for a decent pastrami sandwich and well-oiled latkes, as well as some fine Ashkenazic bakeries. And there’s one remaining café that on weekdays still maintains a neighborhood feel, Les Rosiers, at #2 on the rue. Meanwhile, while fast foodies are now able to enjoy pastrami sandwiches and other New York imports in other quarters of Paris as well (e.g. meaty Freddies Deli in the 11th or vegan MOB in the 13th), while falafels are more common than crepes on some streets.

But I digress. The purpose of this article is not to recommend specific eateries in the Jewish food court or to speak of recent influences to the Paris fast food scene but rather to encourage those interested in Jewish history to look beyond the 20 years of Marais history represented by the Mediterrean-meets-NY-deli food offerings on rue des Rosiers. Enjoy them, enjoy that lingering scent and that occasional glimpse of the Pletzl and an old Jewish quarter—and why not enjoy them insightfully after working up an appetite at more instructive sights? The Deportation Memorial, the Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center would be fine places to start. You can begin by reading about them in this next article.

© 2014, 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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