Rue des Rosiers & the Pletzl: The Jewish Heart of Paris

Why is it significant?

Turn into rue des Rosiers and the Marais changes accent. Hebrew letters over shop windows, bakeries piled with braided challah and poppy-seed cakes, queues outside falafel counters, a bookshop full of prayer shawls, and the narrow street packed with people from morning to night.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Turn into rue des Rosiers and the Marais changes accent. Hebrew letters over shop windows, bakeries piled with braided challah and poppy-seed cakes, queues outside falafel counters, a bookshop full of prayer shawls, and the narrow street packed with people from morning to night.

This is the Pletzl, Yiddish for the little square, the heart of Jewish Paris. The street is named after the rose bushes that grew in the gardens running along the inside of King Philip Augustus's city wall. Jews from Eastern Europe began settling here in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, many of them fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire, and opened workshops, prayer rooms and kosher butchers. After the Second World War came Jews from North Africa, with Sephardic food and music, and today the quarter speaks with both accents.

Walk a few steps down rue Pavée to number 10 and look up at the synagogue squeezed into the narrow street, its tall, rippling façade rising like a curtain of stone. It was built in 1913 by Hector Guimard, the same architect who designed the Art Nouveau entrances of the Paris metro, and it is his only religious building. Guimard's wife, the American painter Adeline Oppenheim, was Jewish, and in 1938 the couple left France for New York.

The war fell hardest on these streets. In October 1941 this very synagogue was damaged by a bomb planted by collaborators. On 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested about thirteen thousand Jews across Paris in the Vel d'Hiv roundup, and many families were taken from the Marais. On the walls of the neighbourhood's schools, plaques remember the children who were deported from them. And on 9 August 1982, terrorists attacked a Jewish restaurant on this street, killing six people.

And yet the Pletzl is alive, noisy, hungry and proud, even as fashion boutiques move in beside the bakeries. From here, walk south, cross rue de Rivoli and rue François-Miron, and find rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier, a quiet street running down towards the Seine. The next stop asks for a little silence.