In 2017, the building of the Archives of the City of Brussels hosted the Brussels step of The BEIT Project 2017-18; European Memory Project 2016-2018.
This project, funded by the European Union under the "Europe for Citizens" program, aims to promote the values of tolerance and respect for diversity among 11 to 15 year-olds students. The latter being perceived as an essential part of the European identity.
For this purpose, the project is interested in the history of the different countries that have made up the European Union and, more specifically, seeks to discover in the richness of each city urban traces capable of animating a debate on the current challenges of society.
The Beit Project thus settles temporarily in significant public places of the local collective memory or other places of architectural and urban heritage and transforms them into places of dialogue and reflection between groups of diverse socio-cultural origins, which will build together a common experience.
In Brussels, the district of Marolles has been chosen. This choice is obviously not trivial. A popular historical district of Brussels, the immigrant populations have followed one another since centuries: Jews from Eastern Europe, Spain, Italy, the Arabs ... It is renowned for its strong personality, its multiculturalism and its solidarity of its inhabitants, the Maroliens.
Part of its urban fabric disappears in the nineteenth during the construction of the extraordinary Palais de Justice, then that of the North-South junction of the rail network.
To discover the results of this project, we invite you to browse the activity report.
Good reading