French Jews remembered those killed in the Holocaust at the annual name reading ceremony which began at the Paris Holocaust memorial on Monday night.

Under heavy rain, dozens of Jews gathered in front of the wall of names at the memorial and read out loud the names of the 76,000 Jews, including 11,400 children, deported from France.

Most of the participants were relatives of the victims but children also took part in the reading and lit candles.

24 hour ceremony

The ceremony lasts 24 hours, throughout the night and the next day in the Marais neighbourhood of Paris.

In the silence of the night, all that could be heard were voices reading out the names of the victims.

Simone Veil, head of the Shoah remembrance foundation, explained the importance of reading the name of every victim.

Simone Veil at the Paris Holocaust Memorial Photo: AFP Copyright 2006

“They [the Nazis] tried to take our identities away by replacing them with the numbers they tattooed on our arms,” Veil said.

“By reading out loud the name of every deported Jew and by carving it on the wall of names,” the victims keep their identity.

Serge Klarsfeld, president of the association of sons and daughters of Jewish deportees from France, was present at the ceremony. “We are refusing to allow the victims remain anonymous,” he said.

Annual commemoration

The ceremony has been organised each year since 1990 by the French liberal Jewish movement (MJLF).

Rabbi Daniel Farhi, who initiated the commemoration said it was “a mitzvah (religious Jewish commandment) to read out the name of every victim, of every one of the 76,000 Jews deported from France between 1942 and 1944 and every Jew executed in France.”

It is the first time that the reading of names was organised at the Paris Shoah Memorial which was inaugurated in January 2005.

Religious services and names readings were also held in Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Bordeaux.