8. Kaddish Monument

The Luxembourg Memorial for Shoah victims was inaugurated on 17 June 2018, 75 years after the last deportation of Jews from Luxembourg to the East. It commemorates the persecution, deportation and murder of Jews who lived in Luxembourg or fled from the Nazi dictatorship to Luxembourg in the late 1930s. It also commemorates the Jewish residents from Luxembourg who were deported from France and Belgium to Auschwitz and those who died in the French and Belgian anti-Nazi resistance struggle. The monument is located near the place where Luxembourg's first synagogue was situated. The sculpture in grey-pink granite was designed and made by Franco-Israeli artist Shelomo Selinger. Born in Poland in 1928, Selinger survived nine concentration camps and two death marches. The artist says the following about his sculpture: "Kaddish is a Jewish prayer for the dead, but there is not a single word about death in it. I am a secular person, a former deportee, the son of a father and mother who were murdered by the Nazis, just like my little sister, my whole family and my people. I had never said a Kaddish prayer before, and with the help of these stones entrusted to me, I was able to chisel and hammer my Kaddish prayer into the granite. For two years I prayed even though I am a secular person and do not believe in the existence of God." (Woxx, 21 June 2018)