A face on a name

What is the “Face on Name” project?

In 2012, the Shoah Memorial launched the project “A face on a name” whose objective is to collect photos of all the Jews deported from France whose names are engraved on the Wall of Names at the entrance to the Shoah Memorial. To date, the Memorial has identified 18,800 photographs, including 4,659 children and 730 survivors. There is still a long way to go to collect the 76,000 photos of deportees.

Photo of the Dreyfus family (Edmond, Jeanne and their children Roland and Arlette) all deported by convoy 71, this photo was recently deposited in the photolibrary.

What are the purpose of these collected photographs?

On the Day of the Holocaust – Yom HaShoah in Hebrew – which commemorates the victims of the Holocaust and the heroes of the Jewish resistance during the Second World War and during which a public reading is made of the names of the victims, in an uninterrupted manner for 24 hours, Day and night, the project “A face in a name” allows each name to be associated with a photo of the person deported in order to honour his memory. The photos scroll on a giant screen placed at the place where the reading takes place but it is also possible to consult them on a site allowing you to follow the reading of the names remotely.

See the agenda of commemorations for 1942

Where and when to upload your photos?

Your documents are valuable in helping us with our transmission work and commemorations.  The photos that will feed into the project “A face for a name” are collected during the photo permanence which takes place every Tuesday afternoon from 2:30 to 5:30 at the Memorial and is open to the public without appointment (except some holidays). For people living in the provinces, a national collection is organized through many cities in France, throughout the year. During these collections, the team of the photo library that welcomes you takes care to quickly reproduce your photographs in order to return them immediately, except if you wish to entrust the originals to the Shoah Memorial.

NATIONAL COLLECTION