Aim

The Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) has long fought to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

The Union of French Jewish Students was born in 1944 during World War II. It was created by young jewish resistants. After the capitulation, the association went out of hiding and works for the social integration of Holocaust’s survivors, and started ensuring the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust. Until today, the Union aims to fight against racism and antisemitism, to promote human rights and to stand up for peace in the Middle East.

Every year, UEJF leads a delegation of jewish students to Poland, so as to visit the death camps, as a way to understand the Holocaust’s specificities. These travels are part of a continuous complex work around the memory of the Holocaust. Some of those memory places are completely destroyed, and survivors are less and less numerous. Traveling there with survivors enable students to discover the culture of Eastern European Jewish Communities, to visit the places where these communities used to live and flourish, as Warsaw or Krakow, and to meet today’s jewish communities. An Auschwitz survivor, Benjamin Orenstein, conducted the group with the iranian students.

Besides this annual trip of jewish students, UEJF leads year after year ad hoc delegations under specific projects related to political and social hot topics : young french political leaders, associations fighting against Holocaust’s denial, student union’s representatives, Gypsy or Roma associations. This year, we invited to this travel, the CIS (Confederation of Iranian Students) and politically engaged franco-iranian personality.