A decline in Holocaust commemoration shows exactly why such remembrance is necessary

It has been reported widely in the UK press that fewer than half the number of schools that marked Holocaust Memorial Day in 2023 did so again this year. The data is stark. In little more than a year, hundreds of assemblies, commemorations, and educational programmes have quietly disappeared from school calendars across the country. This is not a marginal fluctuation. It is a collapse.

The reporting is careful and consistent. The Holocaust has not been removed from the curriculum. Its historical reality is not disputed. The evidence is overwhelming and uncontested. What has changed is the atmosphere. Teachers speak, often anonymously, of anxiety, of fear of controversy, of concern that marking the Holocaust may provoke tension or backlash in the current climate. And so remembrance is avoided.

The problem, then, is not the facts. It is the narrative. For some, the Holocaust has become uncomfortable because it no longer fits the story they wish to tell about Jews.

The dominant moral framework of much contemporary progressive thought divides the world into oppressors and victims. Power determines guilt. Weakness confers innocence. Identity becomes destiny. Once roles are assigned, moral judgement follows automatically. History is filtered to support the framework, not allowed to challenge it.

The Holocaust does precisely that.

It insists on an inconvenient truth: that the Jewish people were victims of genocide not because they were powerful, not because they were colonial, not because they oppressed others, but because they were Jews. Six million were murdered in the most systematic attempt in history to erase an entire people. This fact resists reinterpretation. It refuses to be relativised. It does not sit easily within a worldview that now requires Jews to be cast, in the present, as oppressors.

And that is precisely the tension.

In today’s moral imagination, Jews are no longer permitted to be victims. Not because they did not suffer, but because their survival, resilience, and success complicate the narrative. A people who endured history’s greatest catastrophe and yet rebuilt their lives, their communities, and their future do not fit neatly into an ideology that equates moral worth with permanent victimhood.

So the memory is quietly side-lined.

Not denied. Not explicitly rejected. But made awkward. Politicised. Deferred. Schools do not announce this shift as a decision. It happens through hesitation. Through silence. Through the unspoken sense that some histories are safer to remember than others.

What the woke left has failed to understand is that Jewish history cannot be read through the lens of grievance alone.

Jews have never clung to victimhood as an identity. That is not a modern response. It is an ancient one. After the destruction of the First Temple, Jews rebuilt. After the Second, they rebuilt again. After expulsions, pogroms, and persecutions, they rebuilt. And after the Holocaust, against all expectation and logic, they rebuilt once more.

Judaism does not sanctify suffering. It sanctifies responsibility. It does not teach that pain grants moral immunity. It teaches that even after devastation, life must be chosen again. Time after time, Jews dust themselves off and start again, not because suffering was insignificant, but because survival was never meant to be the final chapter.

We live in an age that speaks endlessly of entitlement and victimhood. Rights are asserted more readily than responsibilities. Identity is increasingly shaped by grievance rather than aspiration. In such a world, the story of the Holocaust, properly told, is not an embarrassment. It is essential.

Not only the story of what was done to the Jewish people, but the story of what the Jewish people chose to do afterwards.

The Holocaust was the greatest moral rupture of modern history. But its aftermath was not despair. It was rebuilding. Survivors did not demand a permanent exemption from moral responsibility. They built families. They built communities. They built institutions. They chose life, not once, but every day thereafter.

That choice is the miracle.

In a world tempted to turn suffering into a permanent identity, Jewish history offers a different, more demanding message: that trauma does not abolish responsibility, that pain does not confer moral immunity, and that dignity lies not in remaining broken, but in rebuilding.

That is why the Holocaust must be taught now more than ever. Not to enshrine Jews as eternal victims, but to show what moral courage looks like after catastrophe. Not to cultivate resentment, but to teach resilience. Not to justify hatred, but to warn against it, by reminding us what happens when human beings abandon moral restraint.

If the Holocaust no longer fits the story, then it is the story that is flawed.

And if remembrance makes us uncomfortable, that discomfort is not a reason to look away. It is a reason to look harder.

Rabbi Benjy Morgan is the CEO of Olami UK.