Community marks Yom HaShoah in moving Westminster ceremony - The Jewish Chronicle

Jewish leaders have pledged that the community will continue to come together to mark Yom HaShoah annually – even after there are no more survivors of the Holocaust.

Henry Grunwald KC, who hosted last night’s Yom HaShoah event outside the Houses of Parliament, said: “We need to renew our pledge that the six million will never be forgotten.”

He called on the three and half thousand people in the audience and the thousands who were watching online “to commit that the Shoah will have a permanent place in our community’s memory and that we will come together each year on Yom HaShoah to pay tribute to all its victims”.

Henry Grunwald KC (Photo: Meron Persey Photography)[Missing Credit]

The chair of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Nottingham added: “The Shoah lives on in us individually and communally, and each one of us has a duty to remember and honour all the victims of the Shoah and to ensure that their lives are neither forgotten nor denied.”

Grunwald’s pledge was echoed by representatives of youth movements and the Union of Jewish Students, who said that they would “ensure the legacy of survivors and refugees would never be forgotten” and would continue to attend Yom HaShoah events annually.

The Yom HaShoah ceremony outside the Houses of Parliament (Photo: Meron Persey Photography)[Missing Credit]

The ceremony, titled “Once in a generation”, was expected to possibly be “the last major anniversary where survivors and refugees” were “present in meaningful numbers”, said Neil Martin, chair of Yom HaShoah UK, when he announced the event a month ago.

Last night saw around 33 Holocaust survivors join politicians, communal representatives and members of the Jewish community and other faiths to commemorate the memory of six million Jews, slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

In Victoria Tower Gardens, the proposed site for the UK’s national Holocaust memorial, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said it was the duty of society “to remember, to listen to those who bore witness, those from Jewish families and communities across Europe who survived the most unimaginable horrors and who have shown the most extraordinary strength in retelling their stories again and again, so every generation understands, so every generation remembers”.

Yvette Cooper and a member of JLGB (Photo: Meron Persey Photography)[Missing Credit]

The ceremony, during which 80 candles were lit to commemorate 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was made even more poignant by the announcement of the death earlier that day of Holocaust survivor and educator Eve Kugler, 94, whom Cooper described as “inspirational”.

Auschwitz survivor Susan Pollack, who lost over 50 members of her family to Nazi genocide, told the crowds: “Remembrance is a call to action. I remember for the sake of my family. I remember for the sake of all survivors. Six million. Jewish men, women and children were murdered. Their lives mattered then and their memories matter now.”

Holocaust survivor Susan Pollock (Photo: Meron Persey Photography)[Missing Credit]

Other speakers included the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely and Board of Deputies President, who said: “In the very shadow of Parliament, across generations, across traditions, we are bound together by memory and by the sacred duty to carry that memory forward. Yom HaShoah is our day of remembrance, but it is also our call to responsibility.”

Playing the Last Post (Photo: Meron Persey Photography)[Missing Credit]

Backstage, actress and staunch Holocaust education activist Louisa Clein, interviewed a number of people, including Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl, whose story has just been made into an animated film – Survivor – by Zoom Rockman; 100-year-old Normandy Veteran and Belsen Liberator Mervyn Kersh; chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust Karen Pollock, and chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Olivia Marks-Woldman.

The Jewish memorial prayer was recited by chazan Jonny Turgel, the grandson of Holocaust survivor and educator the late Gina Turgel, and “The Last Post”, the British and Commonwealth bugle call used at military funerals, was played.

Martin said: “For survivors and their families standing outside Parliament, this ceremony offers both memory and hope — the hope that the lessons of the Holocaust will be upheld, and that the UK will always be a safe and secure home for its Jewish community.”

As daylight faded and thousands of candles were lit by the audience, the choir of 300 children from 15 primary schools joined chazans, an adult choir and the audience in singing the Hatikva, the National Anthem and the anthem for peace, “Oseh Shalom”.

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Yom HaShoah UK