We must stop comparing the terrorist attack of October 7 to the Holocaust, a leading Jewish educator has said.

Clive Lawton, a co-founder of Limmud and a regular lecturer at JW3, has said that while it was statistically true that the murder of more than 1,200 people by Hamas was the worst attack since the Holocaust, it was “factually nonsense” to compare the two atrocities.

Speaking at the annual educational and cultural festival in Birmingham, Lawton said that during the Holocaust, “a massacre happened every day for four years”, adding: “I’m not diminishing October 7, but [the comparison] is meaningless, and we have to stop.”

While there had been a huge uptick in antisemitism in the diaspora since October 7, he said that antisemitism was “not the daily experience of a vast majority of [Jewish] people, and it’s not the context in which we should be living our lives. A lot of people like us. We have a lot of allies.”

Lawton, who is CEO of the Commonwealth Jewish Council and whose talks at Limmud were frequently packed, called on the community to resume “being Jewish people who have hope in the future”.

“Things have not changed forever. We have to find a way to get back out there and create the positive experiences that Jews can give to the world.”

He pointed out that Judaism was “life-orientated, not death orientated” and that Jewish law decreed that if a festival fell during the seven days after a death, the shiva [mourning period] had to stop. “People are celebrating, so who are you to sit in mourning when the function of Jews is to celebrate?”

He said that Jews did not spend a long time grieving collectively and that a yahrzeit – the commemoration of a deceased relative – only took place once a year.

“The Torah says: ‘Choose life.’ I fear that right now many Jews are disturbingly choosing death and must stop it.”

But he conceded that the “emotional intensity” of the hostage crisis was preventing global Jewry from moving forward from October 7. “We have to rapidly get back to a place where Jews feel good, but I don’t know if we can do it before the release of the hostages. Whenever we try to get back into balance, someone will say: ‘What about the hostages?’”