It should welcome its first visitors in December 2025. The Nice municipal council has just approved the provision of a building for the creation of a local branch of the Shoah Memorial. The project, initiated in 2021, was ratified this Tuesday morning, one month to the day after the launch of the Hamas-Israel war and while “anti-Semitic speech was released”, according to Christian Estrosi. Serge Klarsfeld welcomed a “fraternal and comforting gesture” on site.
Thanks to the support of successive mayors, “all the places of memory of the persecution of the Jews in Nice have been marked”, also underlined the activist for the memory of the Shoah before the elected officials of the fifth city of France, alongside his Beatiful woman.
“Paris, Lyon and Nice are cities where the anti-Jewish hatred of the Nazis left the most traces in memories and on the walls,” he also declared, recalling how he himself had escaped a roundup at Nice, in 1943, thanks to a cache installed by his father in a cupboard.
Permanent exhibition and for schools
The Nice branch of the Shoah Memorial will offer programs for schools and a permanent exhibition on the Jews of Nice during the Second World War, made unique by the transition from an Italian occupation to a German occupation in 1943. It will will add to the Paris memorial and the various places of memory installed in Drancy, Cercil, Clermont-Ferrand, Chambon-sur-Lignon and Pithiviers in particular.
The future structure will be located in a former electrical substation of 400 m2 in the center of Nice, rented by the city for one euro per year. The 1.5 million euro work, financed by the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, is due to begin at the end of 2024.
“Anti-Semitism did not disappear with the victims of the concentration camps. We have seen it only too well for a month [et le début de la guerre Hamas-Israël]. Anti-Semitic speech has been released. It’s odious and it’s worrying,” declared Mayor Christian Estrosi (Horizons) before a unanimous vote.