Like the Drancy Memorial, the Paris Shoah Memorial is a museum, documentation center and place of remembrance at the same time. Its mission is to shed light on the past in order to better understand the future.
The Shoah Memorial, which opened in the historic Marais district of Paris on January 27, 2005, complements the Drancy Memorial. Its spaces cater to all kinds of visitors, including a permanent exhibition on the Holocaust and the history of France’s Jews during the Second World War, a temporary exhibition space, an auditorium for film screenings, symposia and other events, a wall engraved with the names of the 76,000 Jewish men, women and children deported from France between 1942 and 1944, the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center (several million items, 120,000 photographs and 32,000 books), a reading room, a multimedia area, classrooms for children’s workshops and teachers’ activities, a bookshop and more. The Memorial also offers awareness-raising programs.