In 2006, Samuel, my eldest son, celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.
That day, Aline, my mother, chose to pass on to him one of the three Judaica that had been entrusted to her parents during the war by a Jewish couple, Charles and his wife, whom I chose to name Esther, since her real name has been lost...
It was a small wooden cylinder, finely carved, holding a calligraphy of the Song of Songs. The casing depicts the Mount of Olives and bears Hebrew inscriptions. In one of its panels, a tiny slide of the Kotel from the late 19th century can be seen. Inside, the calligraphed text unfolds on two spindles, like a Torah scroll, revealing the love song of God to His people.
As Yad Vashem had never encountered such an object before, they created a dedicated file on it and its story in their archives.
That day, a Catholic grandmother passed on to her Jewish grandson a Judaica preserved by her family for decades. The object thus returned to the Jewish community, a silent witness carrying the memory of the lost.
During that transmission, as the emotion was intense, I felt the presence of Charles and Esther. A presence invisible yet palpable, silent yet audible. As if they were saying mazal tov to Samuel, as if they knew they would never be forgotten. I felt they were smiling : destiny was restoring to them a part of the future that had been stolen.
Was it that same synchronicity which willed that the three Judaica entrusted to their friends should return, decades later, to the three grandchildren of those friends, raised in the Jewish tradition? I believe so.
When my children reached their Bar Mitzvah, they embraced a double responsibility: the universal calling of every young Jew to become accountable for their actions, and the singular mission of carrying the memory of Charles and Esther and passing it on to their own descendants.
From this was born In Living Memory, whose three guiding threads, trust, fidelity, and repair, intertwine to root together family memory, communal memory, and the resilience of the Jewish people.
I feel that each time In Living Memory touches a heart, a fragment of the humanity that was stolen is restored to the victims of the Shoah: a voice given back to the lost, and a promise kept to the living.
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