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 "Association des Bâtisseuses de Paix" to be “positive.” The Franco-Moroccan director Ismaël Ferroukhi made a 2011 film entitled "Les hommes libres" ("The Free Men"), about the forgotten history of the Muslim resistance fighters during World War II, with Tahar Rahim and Michael Lonsdale as the leading actors. The film was criticized by the historians Michel Renard and Daniel Lefeuvre, who consider it not particularly serious. The Grand Mosque plays an important role in French social society, promoting the visibility of Islam and Muslims. The mosque was assigned to Algeria in 1957 by the French Foreign Minister. The Paris Mosque serves as the head mosque for French mosques and is currently led by "mufti" Dalil Boubakeur, who has served as rector since 1992. In 1993 the Institut Al-Ghazali was founded, a religious seminary for the training of imams and Muslim chaplains. In 1994, Charles Pasqua, then the Minister of the Interior in charge of Religion, gave the Grand Mosque the authority of certifying meat as halal. On 12 December 2011, an official ceremony marked the start of the construction of a retractable roof covering the great patio facing the prayer hall of the Great Mosque.