History of CJC

The CDJC, Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, is the matrix of the Holocaust Memorial. The desire to document the genocide of the Jews of Europe that inspired the founders of the CDJC during the war is now one of the main missions of the Shoah Memorial, which is at once a museum, a documentation centre and a memorial.

The creation of the CDJC is linked to a name, that of Isaac Schneersohn, an industrialist who clandestinely gathered on 28 April 1943 in his apartment in Grenoble some forty activists and leaders of the Jewish community to decide on the creation of an archive fund.
The goal is to set up a structure that would gather evidence of the persecution of Jews in order to testify and demand justice as soon as the war ends. Objective achieved a few years later at the Nuremberg trial where documents archived by the CDJC will be produced.

The weight of archives at the Nuremberg trial, at the Barbie trial

The archiving work undertaken by the group after the meeting in Grenoble is stopped by the German invasion of the area previously occupied by the Italians in September 1943. It resumes at the time of the battles for the Liberation when Isaac Schneersohn and his team join Paris for the archives from Vichy and the Nazi occupier.

The CDJC group gets its hands on the precious archives of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, CGQJ, the German embassy in Paris, the General Staff, the Vichy Government’s General Delegation and especially those of the Anti-French ServiceGestapo Jew, one of the few recovered in Europe.

At the end of the war, the Documentation Centre created its own publishing house and in 1946 acquired the first historical journal of the Shoah, the Jewish World.
At the Nuremberg trial, the French state relies on the CDJC archives to support its pleading. Recognized for its action, the Documentation Centre is then authorized to draw on the archives of this first major international trial.
In another historic trial, that of Klaus Barbie in 1987, it is again the CDJC which provides a major piece for the indictment of the head of the Gestapo of Lyon, for crimes against humanity: the telex of Izieu.

Documentation and places of memory

Isaac Schneersohn decided in 1950 to add a new dimension to the CDJC by creating a memorial tomb to honour the victims of the Shoah. The first stone is laid in 1953. Ashes from the extermination camps and the Warsaw ghetto are solemnly deposited on 24 February 1957 in the crypt of the Memorial.

In 2005, after expansion work, the new Holocaust Memorial was inaugurated. Its extension has allowed to complete the work started by Isaac Schneersohn by enhancing the documentation center, offering more space for researchers in reading rooms, creating new places of mediation such as the museum, the exhibitions, auditorium and multimedia space. At the tomb Memorial of the 50s came to answer «the Wall of names» where were engraved the names of all the Jews deported from France.