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The Wall of Names at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
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PARIS (EJP)---From Wednesday evening and during 24 hours the names of the Jews who died after being deported by the Nazis in France during WWII will be read in a loud voice, to mark Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The 76,000 names are engraved in the “Wall of Names” at the Shoah Memorial located in the 4th district of Paris.
Such reading takes place every year on April 30, the date chosen by the State of Israel to honor the memory of the Holocaust victims and of the heroes of Jewish resistance against the Nazis.
The memorial day will start with an official ceremony Wednesday evening in the presence of Richard Prasquier, head of CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish institutions, Israel’s ambassador to France Daniel Shek, Serge Klarsfeld, president of the association of Sons and Daughters of Jews deported from France, and Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, director of the Foundation for the memory of the Shoah.
Last Sunday, France’s Defence Secretary of State, Jean-Marie Bockel, called for “the most extreme firmness” against the desecration of graveyards and revisionist statements, during a ceremony in Paris commemorating the Shoah. The French capital’s Mayor Bertrand Delanoë attended the ceremony.
“As soon as there is desecration or revisionist comment, it is necessary to react with the extreme firmness,” Bockel said in a reference to Jean–Marie Le Pen, National Front leader, who in an interview called again the Nazi gas chambers “a detail of the history of World War II.”
The Secretary of State stressed the necessity to fight “without respite” against racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” and to educate the younger generation.
The landmark nine-and-a-half hour documentary film “Shoah” directed by Claude Lanzmann in 1985, which is an oral history of the Holocaust, will be broadcast in four parts on French television from May 5 until May 8.
