Jews of the Somme
Être Juif dans la Somme
Jews of the Somme: a project fostering the duty to remember
The website presented here is part of a multi-pronged initiative to bring to light the lives and fates of Jews in the Department of the Somme in the period from about 1920-1950 with the goal that their experiences should be acknowledged and not forgotten. The website itself is the result of a collaboration with Lydia Rosenberg of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The wider project has drawn support from many sources and individuals and hopefully will continue to do so.
Studying the exhibit on the Jews of the Somme at Lycée Michelis, June 2019.
Two intertwined histories are highlighted in www.jewsofthesomme.com 1) the history proper, i.e. of the Jews and Jewish community in the Somme, c. 1920-1950 and 2) the development of an initiative from 2011 to the present to drive this history into awareness and recognition by governmental bodies, educational institutions and the citizenry in general, notably in the specific region, the Department of the Somme, where the history unfolded.
The period 1920-1950 is illuminated on the site primarily through documents from National Archives subseries AJ 38, examined by the author in 2014 and 2017 in Paris but originating from the files of the Prefecture of the Somme. The introductions to these representative documents are in English, while the original documents are in French, however some documents, e.g. the letters, have been translated into English.
The website www.jewsofthesomme.com debuted in 2016.
Amiens Jews acknowledge receipt of Yellow Stars, June, 1942. AJ 38/5072/1207
Parallel to these efforts, I made a request to the Departmental Archives in Amiens to repatriate the materials (or copies of the materials) from the holdings of the National Archives in Paris. I subsequently provided a digitized copy of the documents, made from microfilm I purchased from the National Archives, to Anne Lejeune, Director of the Departmental Archives. Following up on an initiative of her predecessor, Olivier de Solan, Anne Lejeune secured permission from the National Archives to place the digitized images on computer terminals in the Archives Reading Room in Amiens, thus making a major cache of documents illustrating the measures taken against the Jews accessible in the territory in which the history once unfolded.
Photo by author, 2017
The exhibit later traveled to the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Hillman Library. Être Juif dans la Somme, 1940-45, a French version of the American exhibit, enriched with additional panels, was created by Louise Dessaivre and Sandrine de Solan at the University Library/Citadelle, University of Picardy/Jules Verne in January 2019. This exhibit was later presented at three Amiens lycées: Robert de Luzarches, Madeleine Michelis, and Louis Thuillier.
The original English language version of the exhibit was adapted for this website and launched in June 2020.
Additional information on the development of the Project to revive the story of the Jews of the Somme can be found on the Project Coverage page.
In October 2017, the City of Amiens dedicated a plaque on the site of the former World War II-era Synagogue, whose history could be reconstructed based on materials in the synagogue archives and documents in AJ 38.
In March 2018, an exhibit was created in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at Temple Emanuel of the South Hills : “Who is a Jew? Amiens, France, 1940-1945,” based significantly on the author’s discovery at the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine in 2017 of a series of photo/fiches of the Jews of the Somme as of 1942.
Fiches for Jews of the Somme, 1942. AJ 38 5787