Next week’s main UK Yom HaShoah event to mark 80th anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto uprising

The message for this year’s UK Yom HaShoah commemoration is about bringing the community together.

The event to remember the six million Jews murdered will be streamed live on Monday 17 April at 7.15pm from Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors Centre.

Neil Martin, chair of Yom HaShoah UK, tells Jewish News: “As survivors become less and their movements become more limited, we take the ceremony to Jewish Care, the home of the Holocaust Survivors Centre, to ensure that as many survivors can be at the ceremony. So that while they are able to, every survivor, and every refugee who wants to take part in the ceremony, can.”

Among the 125 guests will be dignitaries including Board of Deputies president Marie van der Zyl and Jewish Care president, Lord Levy. Ahead of its 80th anniversary on 19 April, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis will lead the tribute to the heroism and the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Martin tells Jewish News: “It’s important to show the fightback. It showed a glimmer of hope. That the Jewish people didn’t just sit there and succumb. There were resistance movements; the Righteous Amongst the Nations who hid Jews. Refugees who went on to fight. There’s a lot to remember.”

Henry Grunwald KC will be co-hosting the ceremony with Game of Thrones German Jewish actress Laura Pradelska, whose four grandparents were survivors.

Holocaust Survivors Centre members speaking at the event include Janine Webber, a survivor of the Lwów Ghetto in Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine); Auschwitz survivor Ivor Perl and Henny (Henriette) Franks, who came across on the Kindertransport and celebrates her 100th birthday in June.

Martin says he is keen for the community to access the ceremony via their Smart TV’s, telling Jewish News: “You don’t need to watch it crowded around your laptops. Simply go to YouTube on your Smart TV, search for ‘Yom Hashoah UK’ and it will come up. It’s a comfortable way to watch it in broadcast quality.”

He believes it is important that “with your yellow candle and your Smart TV, with your family, sitting on your sofa, you can all light candles simultaneously with people across the UK which wouldn’t have happened without technology. It brings the whole community together as one.”

Thirty-five thousand commemorative Yellow Candles have been bought and organisers are hoping to reach more than the 20,000 viewers in 2022.

The message, says Martin, is about “making this for the next generation”, adding: “This will bring us all together and reminds us all that we can take a day to remember.”

Click here to purchase your commemorative candle.