In honour of Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, the National Holocaust Museum has launched a new international touring exhibition called The Vicious Circle, exploring and dismantling the recurring delusions that have propelled 2000 years of Jewish pogroms.

Through five stories told via artefacts, texts and video screens in a striking circular installation, viewers will learn about Jewish communities of Germany, Iraq, Poland, Yemen and Southern Israel, exploring the five pogroms that led to the ethnic cleansing of regional communities and the false prophets whose promises of liberation relied on the slaughtering of Jews.

The featured objects, including a German house-shaped tzedakah box, a menorah from Iraq, and a pair of ‘butterfly glasses’ from Israel, reflect the lives of Jewish people and their attempts to integrate into their local communities, but are accompanied by the stories of pogroms which thwarted these efforts.

National Holocaust Museum's new international touring exhibition 'THE VICIOUS CIRCLE’, exploring the recurring delusion behind the anti-Jewish pogrom ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of January 2025. (Photo: David Parry)

“On Holocaust Memorial Day, we need to do more than remember history; we also need to confront dangerous ideological delusions still at work today,” said Professor Maiken Umbach, the National Holocaust Museum’s Chief Academic and Innovation Advisor and Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham. “Why do Hamas claim, as Goebbels did before them, that the Jews secretly run the world from a fictitious manual? Why did a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, claim, as Hitler did before him, that slaughtering Jews would create a free world? History never repeats itself exactly – but it rhymes. Only when we study ideological delusions across time and space can we break their spell. The exhibition does not preach about how to save the world: it is an invitation to think again.”

National Holocaust Museum Director Marc Cave added: “The UK’s theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 is ‘For a Better Future’; well, let’s look at the promise of a better future on offer from some. They promise that a world without Jews, and certainly without a Jewish state, is a better world. They have expressed exhilaration at the latest pogrom: October 7.

“In the cultural arts space, there is a real need to educate and encourage dialogue about that. It has become illiberal. It shows a tendency to endorse the false prophets of today’s extreme left and extreme political Islamism, who recycle the mad delusion of the extreme right and indeed of the Nazis,” said Cave.

A pair of children's ‘butterfly glasses’ made by Shlomo Mansour, 86, the oldest person currently held hostage by Hamas at National Holocaust Museum's new international touring exhibition 'THE VICIOUS CIRCLE’. (Photo: David Parry)

The Vicious Circle, with funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is open in Soho from 21-28 January before touring internationally, first in Tallinn, Berlin and the European Parliament in Brussels.

The exhibition ends with a video call to action, inviting viewers to think critically about how, if at all, the Vicious Circle can be broken: “Time and again, false prophets have promised that slaughtering Jews will set us free,” the video says. “The pogroms they incite have destroyed thousands of communities by murdering & expelling their Jewish inhabitants… and trapping everyone else in an ongoing delusion. After 2000 years, isn't it time to break the vicious circle? And dare to create a virtuous circle… which lives, lets live, and co-creates?"

You can visit the exhibition at 13-14 Dean Street, Soho, London, W1D 3RS until 7pm on the 28th of January.