Nottingham’s Beth Shalom promises ‘a different kind of Holocaust education’

A pledge to build on “a different kind of Holocaust education” and a celebrity lecture by Nottingham University’s professor of modern history, Maiken Umbach, has netted the National Holocaust Museum (Beth Shalom) £100,000 in its latest fundraising event.

More than 300 people gathered at South Hampstead Synagogue last week to hear Professor Umbach forensically unpick the path from Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, to the murder and destruction in Kibbutz Be’eri and many other sites in southern Israel in October 2023.

Professor Umbach, German-born and not Jewish, is chief  academic adviser to the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, founded by the Smith family in 1995, and now under the directorship of Marc Cave. Introducing her, Cave said it was necessary to provide “a very different kind of Holocaust education for a very different kind of Britain. I’m angry, because Britain is still asleep”.

Get The Jewish News Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

Cave described the professor as “an unbelievable ally of the Jewish community”, who had been “under incredible pressure in the last year”, accused of “being a Zionist shill” and whose two sons had faced hostility at university and school.

Professor Umbach spoke of the “pervasiveness of anti-Jewish attitudes in the majority of people in the UK”, particularly since 7 October 2023. Startlingly, she showed that “more than 50 per cent” of the population believed in conspiracy theories relating to Jews. “This is not a marginal thing…people believe that there is a shady, shadowy power behind the throne, people whom we don’t see but who control everything and pull the strings. Essentially this is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, all over again”.

The way to tackle this problem, she said, was “to better understand where this thinking, these feelings, are coming from. We need to understand the emotions, more than the factual errors of misinformation.” She said it was important to take seriously the approach that it was “possible to cure the world of all evil” via anti-Jewish hate, and deplored the fact that it was now more or less “respectable to be antisemitic”. To illustrate, she showed the audience pictures of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One of the images, she said, could easily have been the front cover of the notorious Nazi publication, Der Sturmer. 

Henry Grunwald, KC OBE, chair of the National Holocaust Museum, made the appeal.