The Schmooze
Holocaust Memorial Day should only be about the Shoah
Karen Pollock CBE is chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust
January 8, 2025 14:19
Karen Pollock CBE is chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust
January 8, 2025 14:19Each year, Holocaust Memorial Day offers each of us a time for reflection. It is an opportunity to pause and remember the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered during the Holocaust. It is a moment for solemn contemplation, a time to remember all those who perished simply for being Jewish.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau where over a million Jewish people were murdered in industrial gas chambers.
The day is an opportunity for us to talk about the survivors, who in their twilight years are still relentlessly sharing their testimony, and it is an opportunity for us to remember the victims.
Remembering the dead is a fundamental part of our Jewish culture – we light candles every yahrzeit, the anniversary of a person’s death, and the remembrance prayer Yizkor is recited on all major festivals – and Holocaust Memorial Day offers an opportunity for us to do just that. To remember all of them. That, in a nutshell, is what Holocaust Memorial Day is: to remember all those murdered as they lived. To remember where that unchecked antisemitism led.
We cannot remember the antisemitic hatred of the past without being appalled by the antisemitism we witness in our communities today.
Late last year, we witnessed the shocking scenes in Amsterdam, where Israeli football fans were hunted down, threatened, and beaten. We heard the tragic news of a Chabad rabbi, an ambassador of peace in the United Arab Emirates, kidnapped and brutally murdered. We have seen violent riots rip through Jewish neighbourhoods in Montreal and Sydney, and in Melbourne we saw a synagogue set on fire in an arson attack with community members inside. Here in the UK, we are not immune – a Jewish schoolgirl was hospitalised after glass bottles were thrown at her, a Jewish school bus was pelted with rocks and rubbish by teenagers from another school, and leaflets reading “Zionists leave Britain or be slaughtered” were dispersed in a Jewish neighbourhood.
Against this backdrop our duty to remember the Holocaust – its victims and also its causes – becomes increasingly vital. And yet, we have seen attempts to dilute this crucial mission, to make the day less “exclusive”, broadening its scope in a way that risks eroding the uniquely Jewish experience of the Holocaust and to erase antisemitism from the narrative of the day. Some deem Holocaust Memorial Day too “political” in today’s climate. One event organiser renamed the day, arguing that they should not “single out any one cultural group” but rather “celebrate them all” – if only the Nazis had taken the same approach. In their attempts to be “sensitive” to all viewpoints some have, in fact, misappropriated or misunderstood Holocaust Memorial Day.
Last year participation in Holocaust Memorial Day events fell by 20 per cent. Any attempts to downplay, distort or corrupt the truth of the past must not be allowed to happen this year as we mark this most significant anniversary. Post October 7, it feels even more critical that the Jew hatred of the past is understood, and that today’s antisemitism is called out.
Commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day honestly and with integrity should not be an act of bravery. But this year in some quarters it is. So, as we gather this year to light candles and listen to survivors’ testimonies, let us remember why this day exists. It is a day to reflect on the darkest chapter in human history, to mourn the six million lives lost because they were Jewish, and to vow – with unshakeable resolve – to reject the antisemitism that has taken root historically and that once again is a blight on the world. And to make sure that Never Again truly means never, ever again.
Karen Pollock is chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust