shelter. Built on caves, the Mosque permitted them to secretly reach the Bièvre, a tributary of the Seine. The FTP also helped Jewish families or families whom they knew or at the request of friends, relocate to the Mosque while waiting for transit papers for passage to the Free Zone or to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the Maghreb. Jewish refugees were given papers declaring that they were Muslim and members of the mosque in order to protect them from persecution. Doctor Albert Assouline recorded some 1600 ration cards (one per person) that had been furnished by the Great Mosque of Paris for the Jews who had found refuge there. This little-known history was recounted in Karen Gray Ruelle and Deborah Durland DeSaix's, The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, a book for ages 8–12, published in the U.S. in 2009 (also in French and Japanese editions). The figures concerning the number of Jews housed and saved through the Paris Mosque during this period vary considerably according to various authors. , President of the Association des Bâtisseuses de Paix (Association of the Female Builders of Peace), reports that, according to Albert Assouline, who appears in Birkani's film, 1600 people were saved. On the other hand, according to Alain Boyer, former official working with religions for the French Ministry of the Interior, the number was closer to 500 people. A call for witnesses to the circumstances of Jews saved by the Great Mosque of Paris between 1942 and 1944 was launched on 3 April 2005, at the same time as the Medal of Justice (médaille des Justes) was awarded by Yad Vashem to the descendants of the rector of the Mosque, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, who had saved the lives of a hundred Jews, including the singer Salim Halali, by giving them certificates of Muslim identity from the administrative personnel of the Mosque, thus allowing them to escape arrest and deportation. Serge Klarsfeld, the President of the Association des filles et des fils de déportés juifs de France (Association of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France), is, however, more skeptical about the figure of 1500 Jews saved and states that “of the 2,500 members of our organization” there “is nobody who has ever heard of it.” He considers, nonetheless, that the campaign to launch an appeal to witnesses undertaken by the