The Shoah Memorial Foundation plans to open a branch in Nice. This place of remembrance will present a permanent exhibition on the history of Jews during World War II.
A month after the deadly attack by Hamas on Israel, Christian Estrosi wished to reaffirm his support for Israel and demonstrate his solidarity with its people during the opening of the City Council meeting. He also reiterated a demand for the release of hostages held by Hamas. In this context, the city of Nice displayed the faces of child hostages of the terrorist group on screens throughout the city.
“They (Hamas members, editor’s note) have no legitimacy other than that of terror and fear. They want only one thing: the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people. I am not afraid to say it, yes the Palestinian people have the right to live in peace in an independent State, but such a State cannot exist as long as they are under the yoke of Hamas,” says the city’s mayor.
A minute of silence was observed to pay tribute “to the victims of Hamas, anti-Semitism, and those who wish for the extermination of the Jewish people both in Israel and elsewhere”, before beginning this session with the presentation of the project to create a branch of the Shoah Memorial in Nice.
“We are not acting on the spur of the moment or because of the tragedy we recalled at the beginning of the session”, specifies Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice. This file represents “a long-term effort against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial” started two years ago.
A place of remembrance in the heart of Nice
The Shoah Memorial Foundation, headquartered in Paris, requested the city of Nice open a branch in its territory. It was proposed to the assembly to approve the signing of an emphyteutic lease, valued at a symbolic one euro, for a duration of 85 years. The project was unanimously adopted.
This place dedicated to memory should be installed in a two-story municipal building, with a surface area of 570 m², located at Passage Meyerbeer, in the Carré d’Or district, a few meters from Place Massena.
To transform this property into a future museum, the Foundation commits to investing more than one and a half million euros in renovations. Ultimately, this memory branch will present a permanent exhibition on the history of Jews during World War II and will have classrooms for students and teachers.
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, a couple of lawyers, historians, defenders of the deported Jewish cause, attended this first deliberation of the City Council on November 7. These “tireless Nazi hunters”, as the mayor notes, “honor both Nice, France, and all of humanity for those who recognize themselves in these beautiful and great values they defend”.
Exactly 55 years ago, on November 7, 1969, Beate Klarsfeld was not in a city council room but in the conference hall of Berlin, where she gave a historical slap to the West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi propagandist under the Third Reich.
“Anti-Semitism did not disappear with the victims of concentration camps”
The mayor recalled why this project, proposed by The Shoah Memorial Foundation, makes sense. “It is always on the soil of ignorance and oblivion that hatred, racism, and anti-Semitism flourish. Anti-Semitism did not disappear with the victims of concentration camps, as we have seen only too well over the past month“, he laments.
He refers to the statistics communicated by the Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, last Sunday. Since October 7, in less than a month, 1040 acts targeting Jews on French territory have been recorded by the authorities. “The fight against anti-Semitism is everyone’s concern”, he insists, after expressing profound concern that “one in six French people do not know what the Shoah was”. This figure comes from a study commissioned by the Jewish Claim Conference in 2020.
This deliberation was met with a very clumsy intervention by Sylvie Bonaldi, a municipal councilor, which the mayor commented on only with the following words, as he was appalled: “I find the remarks you just made abominable. I don’t know if when you return home tonight you will really be able to look at yourself in the mirror.”
Honorary citizen of the city of Nice, like his wife, Serge Klarsfeld gave a speech before the assembly, recounting the raid he experienced at the age of 8 with his family in 1943, while residing at an apartment on 15 Rue d’Italie in Nice: “It is an important moment of my long life to stand before you, the sole witness of the tragedy that occurred exactly 80 years ago during the autumn of 1943 when Gestapo captain SS Alois Brunner was hunting the Jewish population of the Côte d’Azur.”
The child survivor of the Shoah, who became an indefatigable advocate for the Jewish cause, acknowledges “a fraternal and heartening gesture from the city of Nice” before leaving the room with his wife to long applause.
