9. Shoah Memorial (Mémorial de la Shoah), Boulevard Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Shoah Memorial consists of the Kaddish Monument and the Wall in Memory of the Jewish Victims of Nazism (Mur en souvenir des victimes juives du nazisme), abbreviated as the Wall of Names. The memorial is located near the site of Luxembourg's first synagogue, which was inaugurated in 1823.
On June 17th, 2018, the Kaddish Memorial was officially inaugurated with a state ceremony. It commemorates the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews who lived in Luxembourg, as well as those who fled to Luxembourg in the 1930s to find refuge there.
The sculpture, made of gray-pink granite, is the work of French-Israeli artist Shelomo Selinger. Born in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Poland) in 1928, Selinger survived nine concentration camps and two death marches. The artist commented on his sculpture as follows: "Kaddish is a Jewish prayer for the dead, but it does not mention death once. 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 entire family, and my entire people. I had never recited a Kaddish prayer before, and with the stones entrusted to me, I was able to carve my Kaddish prayer into the granite with a chisel and hammer." (Woxx, June 21, 2018)
The Wall of Names was inaugurated on September 21st, 2025, in the presence of numerous guests from the political sphere, the diplomatic corps, and relatives of Shoah victims from various countries. It is not a stone wall, but rather a metal structure intended as a nominal extension of the Kaddish Monument.
In Jewish tradition, the name of the deceased must be immortalized on a gravestone or other physical memorial. However, most Jewish victims of Nazism were denied this final honor. Only a few names of Jews murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II can be found on the numerous war memorials or commemorative plaques in Luxembourg's municipalities. The idea was therefore to give the Jewish victims back their identity through their names and thus counteract the Nazis' desire to erase all traces of these people forever.
The memorial wall bears the names of 1,225 Jewish victims of Nazism: 1,157 of them fell victim to the genocide of the Jews (Shoah) and 68 died in other circumstances during World War II. The Shoah victims were either deported directly from Luxembourg to ghettos and extermination camps or, in the case of those who fled to our neighboring countries after the German invasion, from France or Belgium. Approximately 700 of these persons were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
The Wall of Names and the Shoah Memorial Trail in Luxembourg City are initiatives of the Luxembourg association MemoShoah.