Trained as a historian, Jacques Fredj took over the management of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre in 1992, which was founded in 1943 in Paris within the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr. In 1996, he became director of the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr and the following year, he developed a plan for the expansion and remodelling of these two institutions, which would lead to the opening of the Shoah Memorial in 2005.

He was also responsible for the project to create the Drancy Shoah Memorial in 2012. The Paris Memorial, this new place of history and transmission provides a better understanding of the history of the Muette neighbourhood and in particular the central role of the Drancy camp in the exclusion of Jews from France during the Second World War and in the implementation of the deportation of Jews from France. ".

Jacques Fredj recently published Les Juifs de France dans la Shoah (The Jews of France during the Holocaust) a co-edition with Gallimard and the Shoah Memorial, as well as Drancy, un camp d’internement aux portes de Paris, published by the Privat editions.