VIP JEWISH TOUR (4 Hours)

VIP Tours will give you full satisfaction taking you on this unforgettable journey of 4 hours in the Jewish quarter. That will introduce you to the history of the Jewish in Paris through the centuries. Your personal, licensed driver-guide who is a specialist of the history of the Jewish in Paris will pick you up at your hotel in a luxurious Mercedes minivan or car and will tailor your tour to your specific wishes and needs. You will start your tour in the heart of the Jewish quarter that is called rue des Rosiers and its narrows streets and alleys. Here you will find numerous Jewish shops and restaurants. Jews have lived here since the middle ages. In the thirteenth century, it was known as La Juiverie (the Jewry) with its own synagogues, cemeteries and food manufacturers. Some of the street names from that earlier period survive, as we shall see. In 1394, Jews were expelled for a final time and they did not return officially to Paris for nearly four hundred years. Then, you will visit Agudath Hakehilot, an orthodox synagogue designed by Art Nouveau King Hector Guimard, the Art Nouveau architect and decorator famous for the archways he made for the Paris metro. Guimard’s wife, an American, was Jewish and with the rise of Nazism, they left France for the United States. On Yum Kippur 1940, the synagogue was dynamited by the Germans but has been restored and is now a national monument. You will continue your visit discovering “The Wall of the 76000 Names” (among them 11000 children, the Jews of France and Paris exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War) and the memorial and the Museum of the Shoah, the Jewish Contemporary Center of Documentation. Nearby is the old rue des Juifs where, in the rear of the courtyard of number 20, there is a sixteenth century Hotel Particulier known as the Hotel des Juifs. Now owned by an artist, it is a remnant of a Jewish community of the eighteenth century composed of Jews from Alsace, Lorraine and Germany. A few-minutes walk and you will visit the Place des Vosges, the most famous Parisian square, where the actress Rachel lived in apartment house nine. Victor Hugo lived at apartment number six and a modest second-floor synagogue can be found at apartment number fourteen. You will finish your tour returning via rue des Rosiers to rue des Hospitalieres Saint Gervais. Here, at number six is a Jewish boys school. The plaque on the wall commemorates the 165 students who were sent to the internment camp at Drancy and then to Auschwitz where they were murdered. This tour due to the VIP treatment that we provide will leave you without doubt outstanding memories of your stay in Paris.