Du Centre de documentation juive contemporaine au Mémorial de la Shoah

Résumé 0

The author returns to Isaac Schneersohn's solitary adventure. He was the one who, in April 1943, under German occupation, founded in Grenoble the Jewish Documentation Center. The institution, which later became the CDJC, remained for a long while the only organized research center on what was to become known as the Holocaust. The author also shows how in 1953, Schneersohn grants a much larger scope to his original task – collecting proof of the persecution of French Jews and their spoliation – whilst placing the comer stone to the Memorial. Wieviorka likewise shows how Schneershon confronted the Israeli government that had placed itself as the sole “legitimate” keeper of the memory of destroyed Jewry (the Yad Vashem institution). Parallel to these struggles that revived questions related to Jewish identity, integration-assimilation in France, as well as the contents of the Zionist project, Wieviorka details how the CDJC laid the foundation of French historiography on the subject, particularly the work of talented historians such as Joseph Billig and Leon Poliakov, among others, that had been kept isolated, forlorn and condemned to a sentencious academic silence.