Located in the heart of the historic Marais district in Paris, the Shoah Memorial offers visitors many resources and activities in a total surface area of nearly 5,000 square meters. Explore the various spaces that make up the site.
The black marble Star of David in the crypt beneath the forecourt is the symbolic tomb of six million Jews who do not have a grave.
Gathered from the death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto’s ruins, the ashes of Jews are mingled in this place. Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan buried them, with soil from Israel, on February 24, 1957 in accordance with Jewish tradition.
USEFUL INFORMATION: The crypt is accessible when the Memorial is open.
The “Jewish file”, deposited at the CDJC in 1996, is located in an enclave belonging to the National Archives on the same level as the crypt.
It actually groups together several files compiled mainly by the Prefecture of Police between 1941 and 1944 at the behest of the Vichy government. The Prefecture of Police files include individual and family files of Jews arrested in Paris and the Department of the Seine. The “Jewish file” also includes the files of the Drancy camp and the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps in the Loiret. All the files have specific subdivisions for interned children.
Neither the documentation center nor the Memorial has any control over the conservation, management or consultation of the file, which falls exclusively within the purview of the National Archives.
However, the documentation center has a microfilm copy of the entire “Jewish file”. Researchers and families wishing to consult the file at the Memorial are kindly requested to e-mail the Room of Names staff: noms@memorialdelashoah.org.
The file can also be consulted at the National Archives.
Six chests set into one of the crypt’s walls contain the volumes of the “Book of Remembrance”, in which the names of the dead are inscribed to rescue them from oblivion. The chests also contain parchment rolls relating the martyrdom of all the Jewish communities in Europe wiped out by the Nazis.
To register a name in the Book of Names, please write an e-mail to : noms@memorialdelashoah.org
