Shabbat Shalom: To Those Who Carry Sinai Into the Modern World

There are weeks where Jewish history feels distant, abstract, something studied through books, memorials and faded photographs. Then there are weeks where it feels terrifyingly present.

Weeks like this one, where survivors leave us while their warnings remain, Jewish children in British schools are hissed at with the language of gas chambers, exhibitions documenting the massacre of Jews require extraordinary courage simply to exist in London. Weeks where Jewish parents ask themselves questions they never imagined they would need to ask in modern Britain.

This week has been all of this and more and yet this week also brings Shavuot.

The festival that marks not simply the receiving of the Torah at Sinai, but the moment a scattered people became bound together by responsibility. Not merely faith in God, but responsibility to one another, responsibility to memory, responsibility to truth. Responsibility to carry something forward even when the world around you makes doing so difficult.

At Sinai, Jews did not receive comfort, they received obligation. That feels especially relevant now, because the challenge facing Jews today is not simply how we survive hatred, but whether we continue to stand visibly and proudly for truth, memory and Jewish continuity in spite of it.

So this week’s Shabbat Shalom is dedicated to those who refused to surrender to fear, indifference or silence. Those who understood that Jewish continuity is not protected passively, but through courage, education, memory and action.

This week, I want to say Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach to the following people.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach to Jo Woolfe, Sara Dein and the entire Nova exhibition team.

For months they were told London would never happen. They were told the money would not be raised, that the political climate was too hostile, that Britain did not need the exhibition, that the right people would never attend and that it would be too difficult, too controversial, too emotionally exhausting, too risky.

Thankfully they ignored every word.

On Tuesday London became the tenth city globally to host the Nova exhibition, an immersive, visceral and forensic documentation of the 7 October massacre. There has never been a more important moment for it to arrive here.

We are living through a period where truth itself increasingly feels negotiable. People diminish atrocities they would once have condemned without hesitation and social media has created entire ecosystems built not around understanding events, but around distorting them.

The power of the Nova exhibition is that once seen, it cannot be unseen. Once experienced, it cannot honestly be denied. It strips away abstraction and political sloganising and forces visitors to confront the human reality of what happened that day.

That matters because ignorance is no longer always innocent, increasingly, it is chosen. The result being that the responsibility belongs to all of us.

Visit the exhibition, take your children, take your friends. Take those who claim ignorance, those who diminish, those who have allowed themselves the luxury of looking away. If we fail to bear witness when the evidence is placed directly in front of us, we become participants in the forgetting, do not allow that to happen.

Shabbat Shalom to those who brought the Nova exhibition to London, and to those who understand that truth survives only when people are willing to defend it publicly.

Shabbat Shalom to Harry Spiro and the family who so proudly survive him

Many tributes have rightly been paid this week following Holocaust survivor and outspoken educator Harry’s passing at the age of 96. But perhaps the greatest tribute of all was the life he built after everything that had been taken from him.

Again and again, Harry described his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren as his greatest revenge against Hitler and the Nazis. Not revenge through hatred, but revenge through life itself.

The Nazis sought not merely to murder Jews, but to end the Jewish future, to sever the chain between generations, to leave behind silence where Jewish life once flourished. Harry answered them in the most powerful way imaginable, by continuing. What a profoundly Jewish idea that is, that to celebrate life is the greatest revenge one can take on an enemy that sought to eradicate you.

He spoke softly, humbly and gently. He did not seek acclaim or attention, yet somehow his message reached everyone. Students who may otherwise have disengaged listened to him, politicians listened to him, because there was an authenticity to Harry that no performance could replicate. He had seen the very worst humanity could produce and still chose hope over bitterness.

That requires a kind of strength far greater than anger.

At a time when Holocaust memory feels increasingly fragile, when survivors leave us one by one and antisemitism once again becomes normalised in parts of public life, Harry’s message feels more urgent than ever.

Living is the most important thing. Not merely existing, but living proudly, lovingly and openly as Jews. Building families, building communities, but most of all, refusing to allow hatred the final word.

Harry’s was a life beautifully, courageously and lovingly lived.

Shabbat Shalom to Harry Spiro, and to those who understand that every Jewish child, every Jewish family and every joyful Jewish life remains the ultimate answer to those who seek our destruction.

Shabbat Shalom to Jonathan Frisher

At just thirteen years old, Jonathan faced something no Jewish child should ever experience in Britain in 2026.

He was bullied with the language of the gas chambers and subjected to grotesque antisemitic abuse. Threats were made to vandalise his home with swastikas, the kind of hatred many people still desperately pretend is exaggerated or isolated.

Yet what makes Jonathan remarkable is not simply what he endured, but how he chose to respond to it. He did not retreat inward, did not decide his Jewishness was something safer kept quiet, did not surrender to victimhood.

Instead, he fought back through education.

Jonathan campaigned for his school to teach lessons on antisemitism, believing that at least some of the hatred directed towards him came from ignorance rather than inherent evil. Remarkably, it worked and now at still only sixteen, he is campaigning for antisemitism education to become part of the national curriculum itself.

There is something extraordinary about a Jewish child responding to hatred not by demanding less visibility, but by demanding more understanding. That instinct reaches all the way back to Shavuot itself.

Judaism has always understood that education is not secondary to survival, but central to it. We are a civilisation built around questions, debate, teaching and learning, around parents teaching children and children challenging parents. We hold the belief that ignorance is dangerous not simply because people do not know enough, but because empty minds are easily filled by hatred.

Jonathan understood something many adults still fail to grasp, that if we do not educate, others will indoctrinate. But most powerfully of all, he refused to allow those who abused him to define him.

Shabbat Shalom to Jonathan Frisher, and to those young Jews who refuse to shrink themselves in the face of hatred, choosing instead to stand taller, speak louder and educate harder than ever before.

Last night began Shavuot, the moment at Sinai where Jews stood together and accepted not only faith, but responsibility. Responsibility to carry memory across generations, to pursue truth even when it is unpopular. The moment when Jews took on the responsibility to teach our children not only how to survive as Jews, but why remaining Jewish matters.

That is the thread connecting every story this week. The Nova team refusing to allow truth to be buried beneath propaganda. Harry Spiro refusing to allow evil to extinguish Jewish life. Jonathan Frisher refusing to allow hatred to silence Jewish identity.

Each in their own way carrying the chain forward.

For thousands of years, Jews have survived not because history was kind to us, but because generation after generation accepted the responsibility of continuation. Parents teaching children, survivors telling stories, communities building schools. Jews standing publicly and proudly even when fear would make hiding easier.

That is the lesson of Shavuot.

Not that freedom or continuity are guaranteed, but that they must be renewed constantly by every generation willing to accept the burden of carrying them forward.

So, this week’s Shabbat Shalom is dedicated to those who continue to do exactly that.

Those who educate, those who remember, those who build. Those who speak truth when silence would be easier and those who refuse to let Jewish identity become something apologised for or hidden away.

Because at Sinai, the Jewish story was not simply inherited, it was accepted and every generation since has faced the same question: will you carry it forward?

Shabbat Shalom, Chag Sameach, and may we prove ourselves worthy of the chain we were entrusted to hold.