Holocaust Memorial Day: Nothing is more powerful than human connection

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) has been marked on 27 January every year since 2001, in the UK and worldwide.

There are learning and commemoration activities throughout the country on the day, and the period leading up to it, many involving our Liberal and Reform communities.

My synagogue, Edgware and Hendon Reform, joins others in the area in hosting local mainstream schools so that their pupils can learn about the Holocaust directly from a Jewish community. Because of where we are in London, the secondary school children who come to these learning days are themselves from refugee backgrounds.

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The most effective part of the day is always when a survivor of the Shoah speaks to the students and shares their personal story. It is not the statistics nor the retelling of the political and social history which led up to the Shoah, however shocking; it is being in a room with a person who can tell you that this is their story, the story of their life and their family.

The same happens at the Borough of Barnet annual commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day. The music, the history lessons, the coming together of the diversity of our Borough is certainly impressive, but it’s the testimony delivered by the individual survivors of the Shoah – and of other genocides, such as those which took place in Rwanda and in Bosnia in the 1990s – which gets all listening with rapt attention.

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This year, among others, we will hear from Manfred Kalb, who escaped from Vienna in July 1939 with his mother, was interred in the Isle of Man as a potential ‘enemy alien’ and then over the decades built a life in London.

Perhaps this is why so many in the Jewish community, and those who understand our pain, were transfixed by the witnessing of the release from 471 days of Hamas captivity of Emily Damari, Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher. And then, a week later, of Karina Ariev, Danielle Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag.

Yes, we have empathy with the hostages as a group, but there is something so special about being able to witness the freedom of three women with whom we can all identify. This is why it has been so important for UK synagogues to follow the Board of Deputies’ advice to ‘adopt a hostage’ and to get to know them and their family. Nothing is more powerful than human connection.

Each year, Holocaust Memorial Day chooses a theme. This year it is ‘For a Better Future.’ Hearing the individual stories of the victims of violence, racism and terror should move us to never accept a future that is blighted by the horror that humans can inflict on each other.