85th anniversary of the Kristallnacht
On the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the pogrom of 9 November 1938 called "Kristallnacht", the Shoah Memorial received Rima ABDUL MALAK, Minister of Culture and Claudia Roth, Deputy Minister for Culture and Media to the Federal Chancellor of Germany.
Together, they visited the exhibition "Riss: le procès Papon" and met with high school students from Franco-German classes in the Paris region to discuss "racism and anti-Semitism in Europe today".
During this workshop organized by the Shoah Memorial, it was discussed to deconstruct racist and anti-Semitic prejudices, recall the importance of anti-Semitic and racist acts and demonstrate the role of social networks in the spread of racism and anti-Semitism.
Jacques Fredj, the director of the Memorial also recalled about the Kristallnacht:
« How not to make a connection with what happened on October 7. Barbarous massacres of defenseless civilians, elderly people, young girls and children abused and taken hostage. The project of the terrorist organization that perpetrated these attacks is to assassinate the Jews and destroy the State of Israel.
We are all upset, wounded and in solidarity with the State of Israel and its entire population as we were with the victims and their families after Montauban, Toulouse, the Hyper-Cacher, Charlie-Hebdo, the Bataclan, Nice and all the murderous Islamist terrorist attacks that hit our country, particularly those that caused the death of teachers Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard. In France and in Israel, Islamist terrorism has only one face, that of barbarity and hatred.
The mission of the Memorial is to educate against barbarism and hatred of others by teaching the consequences of racism and antisemitism in the history of the Holocaust and genocides. We teach tolerance as well as the values that underpin our Republic. The Memorial tries through education, reflection, the development of critical sense, to dismantle stereotypes and prejudices as well as all forms of propaganda whose risk is extremist indoctrination, complotist, antisemitic, racist or negationist.
We will continue to develop our actions with strength and determination because we believe in man and humanity.
An exceptional meeting around the topic "Nuit de Cristal: photographs that made history" brought together Lior Lalieu-Smadja, head of the photo library at the Shoah Memorial, Herbert Traube, witness to the "Nuit de Cristal", resistant and Shoah survivor, and Bjoern Weigel, historian, author with Christoph Kreutzmüller of Kristallnacht? Bilder der Novemberpogrome 1938 in Berlin, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, 2013.
