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Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation
The Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation was an independent French organization founded by Isaac Schneersohn in 1943 in the town of Grenoble, France during the Second World War to preserve the evidence of Nazi war crimes for future generations. Upon the Liberation of France, the center was moved to Paris. In 2005 it fused with the Mémorial de la Shoah.
The goal of the CDJC was to conduct research, publish documentation, pursue Nazi war criminals, seek restitution for victims of the Nazis, and to maintain a large archive of Holocaust materials, especially those concerning events affecting French Jewry. Part of the efforts of the CDJC include providing educational materials to students and teachers, guided museum visits and field trips, participation in international conferences, activities and commemorations, maintaining monuments and sites like the Mémorial de la Shoah and the monument at Drancy, and most importantly collecting and disseminating documentation about the Holocaust in their extensive archives.
While the Second World War was still underway, the Nazis had already formed a contingency plan that in case of defeat they would carry out the total destruction of German records of the extermination of millions of victims, per Heinrich Himmler's statement to SS officials that the history of the Final Solution would be "a glorious page that will never be written". They largely succeeded in this attempt. In France, the situation with respect to preserving war records was not much better, partly as a result of French state secrecy rules dating back to well before the war aimed at protecting the French government and the state from embarrassing revelations, and partly to avoid culpability. For example, at Liberation, the Prefecture of Police destroyed nearly all of the massive archive of Jewish arrest and deportation.
France's Jewish population before the war was around 300,000, of which 75,721 were deported, with only 2500 surviving. Political deportees fared better, with 37,000 returning. By the 1950s, the Jewish population was half what it was before the war, most of them from Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of the shock and trauma of the war, many Jews converted to Christianity, Frenchified their names, and the number of Jewish ceremonies performed (including circumcision which could identify males as Jewish) dropped precipitously. Many just wanted to forget, and disappear into French society; for most, gathering a history of the Holocaust was not a priority.
It was in this context, that a very small number of Jews first took on the task of preserving the record of events in order that it not be lost to history. In France, this occurred first at Drancy where camp registers were carefully preserved and turned over to the new National Office for Veterans and Victims of War; which however then held them in secret refusing to release copies even to the CDJC.
Already before the end of the war, Isaac Schneersohn, anticipating the need for a center to document and preserve the memory of the persecution for historical reasons and also support claims post-war, gathered 40 representatives from Jewish organizations together at his place at rue Bizanet in Grenoble which was under Italian occupation at the time in order to form a centre de documentation. Exposure meant the death penalty, and as a result little actually happened before liberation. Serious work began after the center moved to Paris in late 1944 and was renamed the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, CDJC).
Its stated goal was to document the persecution and martyrdom of French Jewry by collecting massive amounts of documentation, to study discriminatory laws, to support attempts at recovery of confiscated Jewish property, to document the suffering as well as the heroism of the Jews, and to record the attitude of governments, administrations, and various sectors of public opinion.
Early efforts received little recognition for a number of reasons. One was that these were grassroots movements to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, much of it by people who were not part of academia or trained as historians and thus looked down on by professionals. Another reason was that much of the early historiography focused on the perpetrators, with little effort aimed at documenting the experience of victims, which was relegated to the domain of "memory" rather than that of "history". In addition, early efforts consisted of collecting and publishing primary sources and survivor testimonies, and rarely on analysis and thematic interpretation of events which might have attracted more attention from academia. Finally, Schneersohn wanted CDJC to be the sole repository and outlet for historiography on the Holocaust, and when for example Poliakov published outside the CDJC in 1951, they had a falling-out.[citation needed] However, the early efforts in collecting, documenting, and preserving the basic information laid the groundwork for all future Holocaust historiography. The Nuremberg trials presented the opportunity for its first public appearance on the world stage.
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Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation
The Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation was an independent French organization founded by Isaac Schneersohn in 1943 in the town of Grenoble, France during the Second World War to preserve the evidence of Nazi war crimes for future generations. Upon the Liberation of France, the center was moved to Paris. In 2005 it fused with the Mémorial de la Shoah.
The goal of the CDJC was to conduct research, publish documentation, pursue Nazi war criminals, seek restitution for victims of the Nazis, and to maintain a large archive of Holocaust materials, especially those concerning events affecting French Jewry. Part of the efforts of the CDJC include providing educational materials to students and teachers, guided museum visits and field trips, participation in international conferences, activities and commemorations, maintaining monuments and sites like the Mémorial de la Shoah and the monument at Drancy, and most importantly collecting and disseminating documentation about the Holocaust in their extensive archives.
While the Second World War was still underway, the Nazis had already formed a contingency plan that in case of defeat they would carry out the total destruction of German records of the extermination of millions of victims, per Heinrich Himmler's statement to SS officials that the history of the Final Solution would be "a glorious page that will never be written". They largely succeeded in this attempt. In France, the situation with respect to preserving war records was not much better, partly as a result of French state secrecy rules dating back to well before the war aimed at protecting the French government and the state from embarrassing revelations, and partly to avoid culpability. For example, at Liberation, the Prefecture of Police destroyed nearly all of the massive archive of Jewish arrest and deportation.
France's Jewish population before the war was around 300,000, of which 75,721 were deported, with only 2500 surviving. Political deportees fared better, with 37,000 returning. By the 1950s, the Jewish population was half what it was before the war, most of them from Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of the shock and trauma of the war, many Jews converted to Christianity, Frenchified their names, and the number of Jewish ceremonies performed (including circumcision which could identify males as Jewish) dropped precipitously. Many just wanted to forget, and disappear into French society; for most, gathering a history of the Holocaust was not a priority.
It was in this context, that a very small number of Jews first took on the task of preserving the record of events in order that it not be lost to history. In France, this occurred first at Drancy where camp registers were carefully preserved and turned over to the new National Office for Veterans and Victims of War; which however then held them in secret refusing to release copies even to the CDJC.
Already before the end of the war, Isaac Schneersohn, anticipating the need for a center to document and preserve the memory of the persecution for historical reasons and also support claims post-war, gathered 40 representatives from Jewish organizations together at his place at rue Bizanet in Grenoble which was under Italian occupation at the time in order to form a centre de documentation. Exposure meant the death penalty, and as a result little actually happened before liberation. Serious work began after the center moved to Paris in late 1944 and was renamed the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, CDJC).
Its stated goal was to document the persecution and martyrdom of French Jewry by collecting massive amounts of documentation, to study discriminatory laws, to support attempts at recovery of confiscated Jewish property, to document the suffering as well as the heroism of the Jews, and to record the attitude of governments, administrations, and various sectors of public opinion.
Early efforts received little recognition for a number of reasons. One was that these were grassroots movements to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, much of it by people who were not part of academia or trained as historians and thus looked down on by professionals. Another reason was that much of the early historiography focused on the perpetrators, with little effort aimed at documenting the experience of victims, which was relegated to the domain of "memory" rather than that of "history". In addition, early efforts consisted of collecting and publishing primary sources and survivor testimonies, and rarely on analysis and thematic interpretation of events which might have attracted more attention from academia. Finally, Schneersohn wanted CDJC to be the sole repository and outlet for historiography on the Holocaust, and when for example Poliakov published outside the CDJC in 1951, they had a falling-out.[citation needed] However, the early efforts in collecting, documenting, and preserving the basic information laid the groundwork for all future Holocaust historiography. The Nuremberg trials presented the opportunity for its first public appearance on the world stage.