Created in France underground to document the persecution of Jews in France during the Second World War, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC) is one of the essential components of the Shoah Memorial.
The CDJC, Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation is the matrix of the Shoah Memorial. The desire to document the genocide of the European Jews that animated the founders of the CDJC during the war is now one of the main missions of the Shoah Memorial, which is both a museum, a documentation center and a Memorial.
The creation of the CDJC is linked to a name, that of Isaac Schneersohn, an industrialist who gathered clandestinely on 28 April 1943 in his apartment in Grenoble about forty activists and leaders of the Jewish community to decide on the creation of an archive fund.
The aim is to set up a structure that would gather evidence of the persecution of the Jews in order to bear witness and demand justice as soon as the war ends. Target reached a few years later at the Nuremberg trial, where archived documents were produced by the CDJC.
The archival work undertaken by the group after the Grenoble meeting was stopped by the German invasion in September 1943 of the area until then occupied by the Italians. It resumes at the time of the fighting for the Liberation when Isaac Schneersohn and his team join Paris for the archives funds emanating from Vichy and the Nazi occupier.
The CDJC group has access to the valuable archives of the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, CGQJ, the German Embassy in Paris, the General Staff, the General Delegation of the Vichy Government, and above all those of the anti-war service.Gestapo Jew, one of the few recovered in Europe.
At the end of the war, the Documentation Center created its own publishing house and in 1946, it acquired the first historical review of the Shoah, Le Monde Juif.
At the Nuremberg trial, the French state relied on the archives of the CDJC to support its pleadings. Recognized for its action, the Documentation Center 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 was again the CDJC which provided a major piece of evidence for the indictment of the head of the Gestapo of Lyon, for crimes against humanity: the telex of Izieu.
Isaac Schneersohn decided in 1950 to add a new dimension to the CDJC by creating a memorial-tomb to honor the victims of the Shoah. The first stone was laid in 1953. Ashes from the extermination camps and the Warsaw Ghetto were solemnly deposited on 24 February 1957 in the crypt of the Memorial.
In 2005, after expansion work, the new Shoah Memorial was inaugurated. Its extension has made it possible to complete the work begun by Isaac Schneersohn by enhancing the Documentation Center, offering more space for researchers in the reading rooms, and creating new mediation spaces such as the museum, the exhibitions, the auditorium and the multimedia space. At the Memorial tomb of the 1950s came to answer "the Wall of names" where were engraved the names of all the Jews deported from France.
