Ecumenism" "
“France has the duty to keep alive their memory” and that of “the racism and anti-semitism that at times seems to be gaining ground: the Protestant Federation of France reminds the civil authorities of this duty without any exclusions”. That is the final passage in the statement addressed at the French authorities by the president of the Federation, Pastor Jean-Arnold de Clermont, issued on the occasion of the annual gipsy reunion recently held at Pamiers, a small town in the French département of Ariège, in the Pyrenees. It was attended by some 20,000 nomads. Addressing the meeting, de Clermont praised the work of the gipsy evangelical mission in France (member of the Protestant Federation of France since 1975). He promised “his prayers for the spiritual renewal of the gipsy communities in fidelity to the Gospel of Christ” and then read out to the evangelical community gathered in a large marquee the statement that was later sent to the press. “In this year that marks the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps said the pastor the Protestant Federation of France remembers in a particular way that the gipsy population, in France and throughout Europe, was massacred. Between 300,000 and 5000,000 men, women and children shared the same tragic death as their Jewish brethren. They were massacred in their villages, burnt alive in tents, or left to die of privation or killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald”. Denouncing “the deep silence that still surrounds these dramatic events”, de Clermont pointed out that in France “only five memorials pay tribute to the memory of the gipsies”. Hence his final appeal to the civil authorities reminding them of “their duty to keep the memory alive”.
