Last Friday my friend and I toured the Memorial du la Deportation on the eastern tip of Ile de la Cite. The small, stark memorial\u00c2\u00a0honors the 200,000 French Jews, resistance fighters, and forced laborers who died in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Containers of dirt and ashes from each of the camps\u00c2\u00a0line the memorial’s walls. It’s a place that inspires silence and reflection, quite a contrast to the festive, noisy park just above.<\/p>\n
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Researchers have found that it was mostly the French police, not the Nazi occupiers, who rounded up and persecuted the French Jews. In 1995,\u00c2\u00a0Jacque Chirac became the first French president to\u00c2\u00a0acknowledge France’s complicity in the genocide.<\/p>\n
After\u00c2\u00a0experiencing the\u00c2\u00a0memorial, we walked to the old Jewish Quarter in central Paris’s Marais quarter. My friend needed a substantial meal before services since she would be fasting until sundown the next day, so we stopped to\u00c2\u00a0have a\u00c2\u00a0vegetarian and a\u00c2\u00a0“Texas” pizza (with a chili topping)\u00c2\u00a0at one of the few restaurants serving anything besides wine and beer before 7 PM.<\/p>\n
The Quarter was created 900 years ago in the area around Rue des Rosiers. Many of the\u00c2\u00a0original groceriess, bakeries, and hammams (bath houses) have been turned into trendy shops, and the area struggles to retain its Jewish identity.\u00c2\u00a0According to my Rough Guide to Paris<\/em>, “. . . for a long time local flats were kept empty, not for property speculation but to try to stem the middle-class invasion.”<\/p>\n We arrived at\u00c2\u00a0the orthodox temple and passed through its large wooden doors. We had brought shawls and were wearing tennis shoes: shawls because we assumed we’d be required to cover our heads, and tennis shoes because Jews don’t wear leather products\u00c2\u00a0on Yom Kippur.<\/p>\n