PARIS (AFP)--- French President Jacques Chirac led a ceremony in Paris Thursday evening honouring the more than 2,700 French citizens recognised by Israel as "Righteous among the Nations" for their efforts to save Jews from the Nazis in World War II.

The service -- attended by some 250 of the "righteous" as well as Jewish survivors from the period – took place in the Pantheon, the converted church in the Latin Quarter that serves as a mausoleum for France’s national heroes.

Accompanied by 79 year-old former minister and former president of the European Parliament Simone Veil -- herself a survivor of Auschwitz -- the president delivered a speech celebrating the memory of those who defied the prevailing indifference to hide Jewish families from the Gestapo and French police.

A plaque was later unveiled in the crypt.

Chirac, 74, is expected to leave the presidency in May, and aides said he wants his legacy to be a country that is reconciled with all aspects of its history.

Recognition

Shortly after taking office Chirac was the first president to recognise the role of the French state in the deportation of some 75,000 Jews, almost all of them to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps.

"There is the darkness. But there is also the light," Chirac said at the
ceremony in the Pantheon.

"By your loyalty to its essential principles, you (the righteous) represent that which is most universal about France. Thanks to you ... we can look France and our history straight in the eyes," the president said.

"Sometimes in our history we see moments that are dark indeed. But there is also there that which is best and most glorious. We must take our history in its entirety. It is our heritage and our identity ... Yes, we can be proud of our history! Yes we can be proud of being French!" he said. 

The "righteous among the Nations" are nominated by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel according to strict criteria. There are 2,725 in France, the largest number after Poland and the Netherlands, and 16,000 in Europe as a whole.

Among French bearers of the title is the entire village of Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of the Massif Central, whose Protestant pastor organised shelter for scores of Jewish refugees.

Even though more than 72,250 Jews died after being deported from France, some three-quarters of the 300,000 Jews in France during the war survived -- a higher proportion than in other occupied countries.

During his twelve year mandate, Chirac has made several symbolic gestures aimed at recognising injustices committed in the past.

He has established an annual day of commemoration for victims of the slave trade, paid tribute to the wrongly disgraced Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, and inaugurated a memorial at Verdun for tens of thousands of African troops who fought for France in World War I.