The Oratoire Roger Fleischman is located at 18 rue des Écouffes, in the Pletzl, the Jewish Marais of Paris. It belongs to the small-scale religious geography that developed around Rue des Rosiers, Rue des Écouffes and Rue Pavée from the late nineteenth century onward.

Founding of the Oratoire Roger Fleischman

The Oratoire Roger Fleischman was founded by Armand Fleischman in memory of his son Roger, who died at the age of nineteen in 1931. The oratory served as a place of prayer and Jewish religious instruction for children in the neighbourhood.

In its early decades, the oratory belonged to the Ashkenazi world of the Pletzl. Religious teaching was given there in Yiddish, reflecting the language and culture of many Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who settled in the Marais before the Second World War.

Yiddish instruction and Sephardic continuity

The Second World War devastated the Jewish Marais. Many Jewish families and children from the neighbourhood were deported and murdered. The history of the Oratoire Roger Fleischman is therefore connected to the pre-war immigrant life of the Pletzl and to the rupture caused by the Shoah.

After the war, the religious life of the area changed. From the 1950s onward, the rite practiced at the Oratoire Roger Fleischman became Sephardic, reflecting the growing presence of Jews from North Africa in the Marais.

Cyrille Fleischman and the memory of the Pletzl

Armand Fleischman was also the father of Cyrille Fleischman, born in Paris in 1941. Cyrille Fleischman later became a French Jewish writer whose stories preserved the small Ashkenazi world of the Marais before and after the Shoah.

Part of Cyrille Fleischman’s childhood and adolescence was spent around the oratory founded by his father. His stories kept the memory of the Jewish Marais close to Rue des Écouffes, Saint-Paul and the Pletzl.

The Oratoire Roger Fleischman still functions as a synagogue. Its memory remains tied to Roger Fleischman, to the children taught there in Yiddish, and to Cyrille Fleischman’s literary record of the Jewish Marais.