A face on a name

What is the project «A face on a name»?

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 of 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 collect the 76,000 photos of deported people.

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

What are these collected photographs intended for?

On Holocaust Day – Yom HaShoah in Hebrew – which commemorates the victims of the Shoah 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, uninterruptedly for 24 hours, day and night, the project "A face on a name" allows to associate with each name, a photo of the deported person in order to honor their memory. The photos scroll on a giant screen placed at the place where the reading takes place, but you can also view them on a site allowing you to follow the reading of names remotely.

See the agenda of commemorations for the year 1942

Where and when to deposit your photos?

Your documents are precious to help us in our work of transmission and during the 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 PM to 5:30 PM at the Memorial and is open to the public without an appointment (except on certain public holidays). For people living in the provinces, a national collection is organized across 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 to you immediately, unless you wish to entrust the originals to the Shoah Memorial.

NATIONAL COLLECTION