“Être Juif dans la Somme, 1940-1945” – the exhibit in France

The exhibit “Who is a Jew? Amiens, France, 1940-1945,” presented at Temple Emanuel in Pittsburgh in 2018, was adapted and expanded for a French-language exhibit at the University Library/Citadelle, University of Picardy/Jules Verne in Amiens from January 8 through February 20, 2019. “Être Juif dans la Somme, 1940-1945” was featured in two separate articles in the Courrier Picard and was the subject of an interview with Citadelle Library Director Sandrine de Solan on France 3 Picardie TV. An estimated three hundred persons viewed the exhibit during its run. 

Louise Dessaivre, Director of University Libraries, and Sandrine de Solan were the principal organizers of the University exhibit.

Exhibit panels were subsequently made available for borrowing by interested organizations.  Three public lyceés in Amiens – Madeleine  Michelis, Louis Thuillier and Robert de Luzarches -- took advantage of the opportunity to present “Être Juif dans la Somme” to their students in 2019. Students from the last named lycée, Robert de Luzarches, contributed to the translation of the original English language panels into French.  

A booklet for the French exhibit includes  (as did the handouts for the Pittsburgh exhibit) an introduction with information on the fate of the persons in the fiches and a series of transcribed letters written by or about them. It also includes a bibliography. Click on the text, “LIVRET DE L”EXPOSITION” to view.

The exhibits in the U.S. and France, as well as the current website owe their inspiration and much of their content to one particular resource :  National Archives of France Subseries AJ 38 which David Rosenberg first viewed in August 2014 in the Microforms Section of the National Archives at Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.  From research in AJ 38, he produced several articles subsequently published in the Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de Picardie – one on the roundup of foreigners and stateless persons in the Somme in the wake of the Paris Vel d’Hiv, another on the implementation of the Yellow Star Program in the Somme and resistances to it --- and made several presentations under the auspices of this same organization.  One presentation explained the kinds of contributions that AJ 38 could make to the study  of the Jews of the Somme during the Occupation. A second dealt with the establishment of the first synagogue of Amiens and its history from 1935-1968.  

In August 2017, Dr. Rosenberg discovered on microfilm at the Memorial of the Shoah a series of 43 fiches with passport-sized photos of Jewish adults from the Department of the Somme midway through the Occupation. The circumstances surrounding their creation and the possibility of their having been separated from the original corpus of material that was transferred from Amiens to Paris in November 1945 are considered in two unpublished background papers.