Les commémorations de la destruction des Juifs d’Europe au Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu du milieu des années 1950 à la fin des années 1960

Abstract

This study examines these commemorative ceremonies in the diversity of their functions, their rituals and their protagonists, in order to identify the bundle of shared representations of the event commemorated which oscillates between affirming the uniqueness of the fate of the Jews during the Second World War and the pacifying acceptance of a republican framework for the commemoration.Since its creation in Paris in 1956, the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr which was erected in memory of Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide during the Second World War, has served as a backdrop to a wide variety of commemorations. It is these commemorations – stagings of words and gestures of recent versions of this past persecution and extermination – which are the subject of this article. The period covered extends from 1956, the inaugural year of the Memorial, through 1969, the year that its founder Isaac Schneerson passed away.This study examines these commemorative ceremonies with respect to the diversity of their functions, rituals and protagonists in order to form a varied group of representations of the Holocaust. These representations vacillate between the concept which holds the Holocaust to be an event unique to the fate of Jews to the acceptance of a state idea of commemoration.The study also seeks to examine the contrast between two temporalities – the time closer to the Shoah and the more extended recent period – during which conflicts arose within the Jewish world with respect to political, socio-cultural and institutional issues.