Located in the heart of the historic Marais district, the Memorial de la Shoah offers visitors a wide range of resources and activities on a total area of almost 5,000 m 2. Discover the different spaces that make up this place.
In the crypt below the court is a black marble Star of David. It is the symbolic tomb of the six million dead Jews without burial.
In this place are mixed the ashes of martyrs collected in the death camps as well as in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. These ashes were buried on February 24, 1957 in the land of Israel, according to tradition, by the great Rabbi Jacob Kaplan.
PRACTICAL
At the same level as the crypt, the "Jewish file" deposited in the Memorial in December 1997 is installed in an enclave of the National Archives. Several files made between 1940 and 1944 are grouped together, including the files of Jews arrested in Paris and in the department of the Seine as well as the files of the interned from the camps of Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret. The Drancy camp logs are also kept.
Some files have a specific subdivision for children interned and/or deported.
All these documents have been digitized by the Memorial and are available at the documentation centre.
How do I access this file?
The CJC and the Memorial have no authority over the preservation, management and consultation of the file, which is the exclusive responsibility of the National Archives.
However, the CJC has a microfilm copy of the entire “Jewish file”. Researchers and families wishing to consult this file at the Memorial are invited to contact the Hall of Names by e-mail:
It is also possible to make these consultations at the National Archives.
The Book of Remembrance
Encased in one of the walls of the crypt, six coffers contain the volumes of the «Book of Remembrance» in which are inscribed the names of the disappeared, thus preserving them from oblivion. In these chests are also scroll rolls relating the martyrology of all the Jewish communities of Europe decimated by the Nazis.