Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to be able to open this year’s Holocaust memorial debate.
In TheSunday Times of the week before last, the Chief Rabbi described the dilemma of the teacher faced with the question of what to do on Holocaust Memorial Day. Given the polarising impact of the events of October 2023 and the terrible loss of life in Gaza, it may be simpler not to have an event at all this year. In 2023, 2,000 schools held events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Some 1,200 schools did so in 2024, 854 did so in 2025, and almost certainly there will have been fewer this year. The Chief Rabbi asked the question that we are all asking: as we lose the last survivors—the eye witnesses of the Holocaust—how will we keep our oft-repeated promise to them that we will never forget?
The Chief Rabbi speaks of the moral foundation of our society, and of how the Holocaust did not start from nothing. It started with a normalisation of division, prejudice and hatred, building on the oldest hatred of all. There is a warning here for all of us: do not imagine that it can never happen again in our time. That is why it is so important to remember, why I believe it is so important for us to build a national Holocaust memorial, and why I am so pleased that that was included in the Government’s legislation. Let us get it done before the last eyewitnesses pass into the history books.
I have lived with my family in East Anglia for 30 years. I am a part of the Jewish community of Norwich, a member of the synagogue and a past president of the community. There is a beautiful restored synagogue and a small thriving community. The community was established in the 19th century following the arrival of Jewish people from Europe, who were largely fleeing discrimination and persecution. I am delighted that Mrs M. Leveton, aged 80-plus, and her husband Mr B. Leveton, aged 90-plus, were both awarded the British Empire Medal in the new year’s honours for their lifelong service to the community.
However, ours is not the first Jewish community in Norwich. Jewish people came to England with the Normans. Communities formed in many cities under the protection of the Crown, at Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, King’s Lynn and Thetford—all over the successfully growing economy of East Anglia. Moneylending was forbidden to Christians, so Jews began to work in finance and moneylending. A special Exchequer of the Jews was established by the Crown to collect taxes. Great chests with multiple locked clasps were made to keep Exchequer rolls and documents. There were five locks, with the keys held by Crown agents and local citizens so that they could only be opened together, to prevent any disagreements. Lately I discovered just such a chest in a church at North Creake.
The county archive in Norwich contains hundreds of medieval property leases and documents, many of which are written in Hebrew. They have curiously wavy and crenelated margins, for they were written in duplicates to enable matching copies and ensure that there were no forgeries. These are called indentures. The leases have allowed a detailed map of the ancient city centre to be drawn, showing the location and the ownership of the houses, and the location of the synagogue, the school and the physician, for there were Jewish doctors in Norwich 1,000 years before I was appointed.
The hon. Gentleman is making a fascinating opening speech, and I congratulate him on securing this debate. Could I ask him to re-emphasise the point he has just made, which is that such a grouping of an entire religion, race or ethnicity with the actions of a Government is an entirely antisemitic act?
I absolutely agree with the right hon. Member: that is exactly the case. He makes the point extremely well, and I thank him for doing so.
The banning of a Jewish MP from a local school in Bristol was simply an outrage. We receive messages from families of isolated Jewish pupils in rural East Anglian schools where there are persistent taunts and worse, and the schools are simply unable to cope. Resources must be found to address this problem, because this is urgent.
Antisemitism, which never disappeared from this country, exploded after the events of 7 October 2023, even before the actions of the Israel Defence Forces. There has been a terrible war in Gaza, but the origins of the political problems are ancient and complex, and it is not the responsibility of the law-abiding Jewish citizens of this country, who have been intimidated and vilified. I welcome the measures that our Government have announced to address this.
I am a Jewish MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, and the very first Jewish MP for the town that was the first to expel its Jews in 1190 following the slaughter of 53 Jewish citizens—commemorated with a steel teardrop in the abbey gardens—so history has come full circle. There is no greater honour in my life and no greater duty than to ensure that we will always remember them.
It is an honour to follow an excellent opening speech from the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley). I congratulate him on the way he has introduced this debate. I declare my interests as the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on the Holocaust memorial and education centre, co-chairman of the APPG on Israel and sponsor of this year’s Holocaust memorial reception in Portcullis House, on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Trust.
We gather today to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945. That moment exposed to the world the full horror of the Nazi regime’s systematic murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children—for the benefit of the BBC, I say Jewish men, women and children. However, Holocaust Memorial Day is also a moment to remember the millions of others who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, such as the Roma, disabled people, political dissidents and others. We remember not only to honour the victims, but to understand how such an atrocity became possible and how we must never allow it to happen again.
The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers and the death camps, and too often we forget the context. In the decades before, hatred was allowed to grow in Germany; prejudice became normalised; and language, institutions and social norms were slowly corroded. In the great war, Germany was defeated, and afterwards it was economically shattered. The treaty of Versailles imposed territorial losses, military restrictions and severe reparations, the burden of which fell heavily on ordinary people in Germany. The Weimar republic, although democratic in structure, was fragile, and economic catastrophe soon followed. In fact, hyperinflation in the early 1920s left Germans burning paper money to keep warm, because the currency’s value had fallen away. Widespread poverty took hold, and in times of despair, many people searched for simple explanations—and for scapegoats.
Again, my hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. Does he share my horror and disgust that yesterday, a member of the public thought it was entirely appropriate to dress as a prisoner of one of the concentration camps? Surely this is the hatred he is describing.
Indeed, I condemn that action, and all actions that seek in some way, shape or form to glorify or justify the Holocaust.
The lesson matters profoundly today. Holocaust Memorial Day plays a vital part in educating the public on the dangers of prejudice, discrimination and hatred—dangers that, if left unchecked, can escalate once again into violence and even genocide. It honours survivors and preserves their testimony, particularly now that the number of first-hand witnesses is sadly diminishing—a point to which the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket alluded. The theme for this year, “Bridging Generations”, is therefore a powerful call to action. The responsibility for remembrance does not end with the survivors. It must be passed on to their children, grandchildren and all of us, so that memory becomes responsibility. That matters, because antisemitism in the UK remains at alarmingly high levels. Following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, antisemitic incidents surged dramatically. According to the Community Security Trust, 1,521 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the first half of 2025 alone—the second highest total ever recorded for that period. Although that is lower than the number in the record year of 2024, that still represents a sustained and deeply troubling level of hostility that is far above the pre-October 7 averages.
As the hon. Gentleman knows, I do not always agree with him, but I very much agree with the case that he is making today and what he is saying. He mentioned the surge in antisemitism in the UK. Would he agree that Ofcom needs to crack down on online hatred—particularly antisemitism, but also Islamophobic tweets? The Jewish community and those of many other faiths are subject to a terrifying amount of online hatred.
I thank the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, for that intervention. The sad reality is that following my question to the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday, my social media accounts were loaded with antisemitic tropes. It is a disgrace, and Ofcom has to take action. It is our duty to ensure that hate speech is never allowed to continue. I believe in free speech, but I do not believe in preaching hatred to one another, regardless of religion, and action has to be taken on that.
Greater London and Greater Manchester remain hotspots of antisemitism; there was an attack on the synagogue in Manchester during Yom Kippur. Online antisemitism, to which the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) just referred, now accounts for well more than a third of all incidents. Holocaust-related abuse appears with disturbing frequency, and there has been a sharp rise in the glorification of the Holocaust. Behind these statistics lies a chilling reality: many Jewish people in Britain feel unsafe, unwelcome or forced to hide their identity in public. Surveys suggest that around half have considered leaving the UK due to antisemitism. That should trouble every one of us.
We must be honest about the ways in which contemporary antisemitism often disguises itself. Increasingly, anti-Israel activism functions as a Trojan horse for antisemitism, allowing ancient prejudice to re-enter public discourse under the cover of political critique. Legitimate criticism of any Government is entirely valid, but when Israel becomes uniquely demonised, Zionism is used as a slur and Jewish institutions and individuals are targeted, regardless of their views, we are no longer in the realm of political debate. CST data shows that a significant proportion of antisemitic incidents now blend anti-Zionist language with classic antisemitic tropes: claims of secret control, collective guilt or global conspiracy. On campuses and online platforms, and in public demonstrations such as yesterday’s, Jewish students and citizens are increasingly made to feel responsible simply for who they are. That not only undermines free speech; it poisons it.
The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is “Bridging Generations”. That recognises that as the remaining survivors who can directly bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust pass away, living memory must become collective memory. As Jews, we know all about collective memory. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, said:
“One of the most important halachic responses to tragedy is the act of remembering, Yizkor. More than it has history, the Jewish people has memory. There is no word for history in the Tanach, and modern Hebrew had to borrow one, historiah. But the word zachor (remember), occurs no fewer than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. The difference between them is this: history is someone else’s story; memory is my story. In history, we recall what happened…so that it becomes part of us and who we are… We cannot bring the dead to life, but we can keep their memory alive.”
This Shabbat, Jews around the world will be reading Parashat Beshalach. The Torah portion opens with the Pharoah pursuing the Israelites into the desert and the miracle of the splitting of the Red sea. It ends with victory over the Amalekites, the first enemy that the Israelites face upon escaping Egypt. There are so many biblical teachings through which we can approach the Shoah in Beshalach. In particular, we can approach it through grappling with the evil of Amalek and the Pharoah, and we can contemplate the act of remembrance through how we are commanded to commemorate these events. This year, I came across a perspective that is both subtle in the closeness of the reading of it, and also completely striking in its depth.
I have been reading “Esh Kodesh”, written by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, of blessed memory, the Rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto. Composed between 1939 and 1942, it is a truly astonishing body of work. Reflecting on Parashat Beshalach, he notes that in the text, Exodus 13:21 begins:
My hon. Friend is making a powerful and educational speech; I thank her so much. Will she join me in thanking John Hajdu MBE, who came to Brent yesterday to share with us his story of how he survived the Holocaust? As a young boy, he survived only because a non-Jewish family hid him in a cupboard for days on end. Will she join me in thanking him for sharing his story, so we can keep it alive?
I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and share her thanks to the survivor she mentions, but I also send our thanks to that generation of survivors who were so determined to ensure that their stories were carried forward so that we can learn from them.
Right hon. and hon. Members can visit the museum not far from here at Westminster synagogue, home of the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust, to see the scrolls I referred to and artefacts from those communities.
Remembrance of the Holocaust is, however, a society-wide effort that Jews cannot undertake alone. At a time of rising antisemitism globally, when Jews in Manchester and in Bondi Beach are killed just for being Jews, this same antisemitic poison is again taking root and must be confronted. We should remember the evils of the past to fight the evils of the present, taking strength from the everyday acts of resistance, large and small, and bringing their stories with us to secure for us all a safe and secure future. Eight decades on from the Holocaust, that is more important now than ever.
I am honoured to be here for this debate. I thank the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) for leading the debate, and opening it with such an incredibly moving speech.
Genocide does not just happen. There is always a path: there is always a terrifying and evil journey towards it. The intention to destroy a group of people is an unspeakable idea. It is difficult to comprehend and yet it has happened not once but multiple times across the globe. Remembering the Holocaust is not just a Jewish issue; it is a human one. Education, reflection and, crucially, action become more and more important each day as we face increasingly fractured communities, inflammatory online rhetoric, and the casual othering of minority groups. Recent events both in the UK and abroad reiterate that “never again” cannot rest on remembrance alone; it needs conscious action.
The Nazi regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children. That is 6 million stories, 6 million people who loved, 6 million people who added immeasurable value to this world. That murderous regime also killed Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, gay men, political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others that they deemed undesirable. In total, around 10 million people were murdered. But the Holocaust was not carried out by mobs and Nazis alone. It was enabled by the systematic involvement and compliance of institutions, including the police, civil servants, universities, courts and local authorities—the very institutions that were created to protect and serve. Instead, those institutions enforced discriminatory laws, facilitated deportations, and normalised othering and, eventually, murder. Prejudice becomes policy when institutions fail to act against hatred.
We are talking about a scale of suffering and terror that is beyond comprehension, and that is why personal stories are so crucial to our learning and reflection. I would therefore like to share some stories of my constituents who survived.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) and for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) for their powerful and moving testimony. They are a credit to their community and their constituents.
Holocaust Memorial Day is a time when we remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. The theme of this year’s memorial day is “Bridging Generations”. It is the solemn duty of all of us, in this place and beyond it, who have had the privilege of meeting Holocaust survivors, to pass on their testimony to younger people so that we all may bear witness, collectively, to their suffering and their memory.
On that note, it was a real honour last week to meet 95-year-old Mala Tribich MBE in Parliament, and to hear her very moving testimony of how she and her brother were the only members of her family to survive the Nazi Holocaust, following her imprisonment in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen camps. Many Members will agree how heartbreaking it was to hear of her pleading with the SS guard not to put her on a train. Mala told me afterwards how proud she was of her brother Ben, who went on to represent Britain at the Olympics as a weightlifter. Ben, who passed away in 2023, was one of the 700 Jewish youngsters taken to Cumbria from the death camps.
Ike Alterman, who passed away at age 97 in December last year, was the last surviving Greater Manchester member of that group of so-called Windermere children. I mention Ike because his story is well known by the children of Rochdale, particularly in Falinge Park high school, which he visited three years ago to share his experiences. Ike recalled picking sprouts in the bitter Polish winter for the SS officers’ Christmas dinner. He and the other Jews had no proper clothing and no shoes—Ike strapped straw to his feet to walk in the snow. The SS officer said that if he and fellow children sang “Silent Night” they would get a bonus: a ladle of warm water to put sprout skins in. Ike said:
I want to add my voice to my hon. Friend’s comments about the Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves association. I had the real honour of meeting them myself around a decade ago, and their work is absolutely extraordinary. Will my hon. Friend join me in encouraging all Members of the House to take the opportunity to learn from them about what we can do to ensure that we do not carry into the future the hate that caused them to lose their husbands and sons?
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On King Street there is a great merchant’s house, which still stands. It was the house of Isaac Jurnet. It is the oldest house of Jewish habitation in England, and the vaulted crypt is unaltered since the time of Jurnet, who was the financier of the cathedral and much else besides. The house is presently in need of restoration, and there is a plan to create a centre for the study of antisemitism with the department of Jewish studies at the university. Never has this been more essential.
Which country in Europe was the first to expel the Jews? It was right here in Parliament, in 1290, that King Edward decreed that the Jews must leave. They were not allowed to return until the time of Oliver Cromwell, hundreds of years later. We should not imagine that this is a uniquely German idea; this is an ancient hatred and, with the leave of the House, I will tell Members something about it. It was in Norwich, in 1140, that the Jews were falsely accused of murdering a boy called William to use his blood for sacrifice—something that Jews never do. This is the infamous blood libel, which sparked antisemitic hatred all over England and echoes throughout the ages, even to this day.
Some 20 years ago, a shopping centre was under construction. A medieval well full of skeletons was revealed—17 skeletons from three families, including children. A BBC “Hidden History” documentary brought the story to our attention when it was revealed that they were almost certainly Jewish skeletons. The bones were handed to the local community, and here I must name my dear departed friend, Mr Clive Roffe, who insisted that the bones be given a dignified Jewish burial. I held the bones in my hand, and there was a large hole in the side of a skull. Even after all these years, it was obviously not a natural hole. DNA studies by the Natural History Museum here in London showed that there were genetic matches to contemporary British Jews. Here we have scientific evidence of an English pogrom in 1190. Antisemitism is not new.
Holocaust Memorial Day is so important. This year, the theme is “Bridging Generations”. Last weekend, I was privileged to attend the Holocaust Memorial Day events at Wells-next-the-Sea. A small group of non-Jewish people have established a regular series of cultural events at the Maltings arts centre. Diana Cook spoke about her mother, Margot, who escaped in the days before the outbreak of the war to become a nurse and who lost all her family in the Holocaust. Diana is part of an oral history initiative called G2G—Generation 2 Generation—which carries the story of the Holocaust down the generations. Margot spoke little of her childhood, and only after she died did Diana fully appreciate the crucial importance of oral history and of Generation 2 Generation. I thank her from my heart and soul.
On Monday, I attended a most moving service at the Foreign Office, and I must thank the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the embassy of Israel and the chargé d’affaires, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, for the invitation. We heard the extraordinary testimony of Marla, who with her brother Ben Helfgott, were the only members of a large family to survive. I have heard Marla speak before, but her haunting testimony only amplifies in significance as one hears it again. We heard the quite incredible voice of Cantor Turgel, the grandson of Gena—the bride of Belsen—who married the British soldier who liberated her. He sang the prayer for the departed, “El Male Rachamim”—“God full of compassion”—the prayer which asks God to grant rest to the souls of the deceased.
On Holocaust Memorial Day itself I was so proud to stand in the cathedral of Bury St Edmunds, alongside local Jewish citizens and the schoolchildren of Suffolk, and to make the declaration of remembrance as the first Jewish MP for this ancient town, for we are living in a time of increasing polarisation and division. This is our struggle. I have seen the marches, and they fill me with foreboding. We have seen the protests, and we have seen the rise of far-right, so-called populists all over the world, including right here on Westminster bridge. Too often, the legitimate street protests against the actions of the Israeli Government have simply degenerated into shocking antisemitic chanting. The murderous attacks on Jews on Yom Kippur in Manchester and in the attack in Australia did not arise from nowhere. This is our real and present danger, and we must not underestimate it, for it is pervasive.
It was in that climate that the Nazi party rose to prominence. Hitler and his supporters offered simplistic answers to complex problems. They promised national revival, strength and unity, while identifying enemies within. Jews were portrayed not as fellow citizens, but as outsiders. They were dehumanised and blamed for Germany’s defeat, its economic hardships and the perceived decline of society. Hatred was not accidental; it was systematic, deliberate and relentlessly reinforced. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, antisemitism became state policy. Just imagine that: it was state policy to outlaw a particular religion. Persecution began not with mass violence, but with exclusion. Jewish civil servants were dismissed, Jewish businesses were boycotted and Jewish professionals were barred from practising law and medicine, and from teaching. Those measures were designed to isolate, humiliate and impoverish an entire community.
It is important to stress that while most people did not actively participate in persecution, most chose to look away while it happened. Silence, passivity and indifference allowed injustice to become embedded and, ultimately, unstoppable. Persecution soon escalated. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and basic rights, reducing them from equal members of society to subjects of the state. Violence became overt. In November 1938, Kristallnacht marked a decisive turning point. Synagogues were destroyed, Jewish homes and businesses were attacked, and thousands were arrested by the state—not by mobs acting alone, but by authority itself.
With the outbreak of the second world war, persecution turned into annihilation. Jews were forced into ghettos, and we will no doubt hear about harrowing testimonies of overcrowding, hunger, disease and despair. From 1941 onwards, death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor were constructed for one purpose alone—mass murder. Trains arrived from across Europe, and people were selected, exploited and killed on an industrial scale. There were some who resisted, often at immense personal risk, and they remind us that choices are always possible, but they were the exception, not the norm.
We must confront the disturbing rise of Holocaust inversion: the grotesque distortion that portrays Jews or Israel as the new Nazis. That is not merely offensive rhetoric; it threatens and trivialises the Shoah, inverts reality, and inflicts profound harm on survivors and their families. Equating the Star of David with the swastika or accusing the Jewish state of genocide is not historical analysis; it is antisemitism. We must be clear and unequivocal in condemning it.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, we should acknowledge the historical link between the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel. Zionism long predates the second world war, but the genocide of European Jewry underscored with devastating clarity the need for a Jewish homeland—a place of refuge and self-determination. Many Holocaust survivors helped build that nation, carrying the scars of the camps with them. Attempts to de-legitimise Israel ignore that history and risk erasing the fundamental lesson of “never again”.
Finally, I want to turn to the future. Last week, the Holocaust Memorial Act 2026 received Royal Assent, paving the way for the national Holocaust memorial and learning centre to be built in Victoria Tower Gardens, beside this very Parliament. Proposed by a cross-party commission more than a decade ago, the memorial will honour the victims and educate generations to come. The proposal was started by Lord Cameron and was supported cross-party. As the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket said, we must get that memorial built before the last of the survivors is no longer with us. Its location matters. It will stand as a permanent reminder, at the heart of our democracy, of where hatred can lead when left unchallenged.
As we remember the victims today, we also reaffirm our responsibility to challenge antisemitism wherever it appears, defend democratic values and human dignity, and ensure that history is neither forgotten nor distorted. When we see demonstrations and attempts to blockade Jewish businesses, restaurants and synagogues, we must call it out for what it is: antisemitism, pure and simple. Remembrance is not only about the past; it is a warning for the present, and a duty that we owe to future generations. I and, I believe, the whole House will recommit to carrying out that duty.
“And God goes before them by day with a pillar of cloud to guide them along the way, and by night with a pillar of fire providing them with light to travel day and night”.
This is the first place where the text uses the present tense. With extraordinary faith and courage, and recognising the “bitter reality” that people were living through, he concludes:
“we must use the judgments and suffering we endure properly, utilising them to worship God, to keep going day and night”.
That this present tense speaks of the presence of God in their midst at a time of unimaginable privation, and is a source of strength for them to draw on, is profoundly moving as a contemporary reader. Later on in the parashah, Exodus 15:1, it reads:
“And they spoke, to say, I will sing to God for his great victory”.
Noting here the future tense, Rabbi Shapira says:
“Already, when still in Egypt, they could see God’s salvation, and so they were able, in their minds, to ‘sing in the future’—‘to say’ implies that they succeeded in establishing this for future generations”.
Rabbi Shapira did not live to see this victory, to sing in the future. He was murdered in Aktion Erntefest—Operation Harvest Festival—at Trawniki concentration camp on 3 November 1943. Jewish prisoners were separated from non-Jewish prisoners, and up to 43,000 Jews at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps were killed in two days—the single largest German massacre of Jews in the Holocaust. In all three camps, Jews were forced to strip naked and walk into dug trenches, where they were shot dead. Loud music was played to cover the sound of the gunfire.
Rabbi Shapira’s writing, however, survived to inspire future generations, buried in milk cannisters as part of the Oneg Shabbat underground archive, established in 1940 by Emanuel Ringelblum and a secret group of scholars and writers, to document the suffering, resistance and daily life of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, ensuring their story was not lost. They said:
“It must all be recorded with not a single fact omitted. And when the time comes—as it surely will—let the world read and know what the murderers have done.”
We mourn the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. We mourn the lives cut short, the lives never lived, the children and grandchildren never born; the art, music and literature never written; the enormous loss to humanity itself of a tragedy at a scale we can barely fathom that reverberates through modern history and into our present. But as we mourn, we remember. As Jews, we can take forward our cultures, teachings and traditions to future generations, as we have always done, from the Exodus onwards, denying Hitler what the theologian Emil Fackenheim called “a posthumous victory”. Many Jewish communities around the world read and learn Torah from Czech scrolls from the desolated synagogues of Bohemia and Moravia, honouring the communities who were killed and keeping the flame of their memory alive.
In 1939, Leonard Kaufmann’s uncle managed to secure a place for him on the Kindertransport, leaving behind his siblings and parents who later died. At four years old, Leonard remembers sitting on a barstool on his arrival to the UK, all alone and waiting to be collected, not able to speak English, scared and completely unsure of what was to come. Leonard went on to lead a successful career and have a happy family home in Gatley, despite experiencing one of the hardest starts to life anyone could imagine. He was a proud administrator at Yeshurun synagogue, which sits proudly in the heart of Gatley.
Peter Kurer was taken in by a Quaker family in Manchester with his brother and parents after they learned the SS were coming for his father. Later, Peter selflessly volunteered considerable time towards the establishment of a retirement home in Didsbury for Jewish refugees.
Martin Hyman shared with me the story of his mother who grew up in 1930s Vienna and was expelled from school simply for being Jewish. Aged just 13, she was sent alone to Britain on the Kindertransport. She never saw her parents again.
Sadly, these stories are not unusual. Martin said to me:
“In 1938, 272 Jews were recorded as having lived in the street in Vienna where my mum grew up. She was one of only 13 who survived the Holocaust.”
They reflect the experience of thousands of children whose lives were saved only because others acted. I am asking everyone in this House today to imagine the pain and suffering inflicted from just these singular stories and multiply that by 1,000 and then multiply it again.
I would like to pay tribute to Paul Porgess, a survivor of the Holocaust who was not only my friend, but a mentor to me. Paul was born in Czechoslovakia to parents Victor and Olga. During the second world war, his family were deported to the ghetto in Warsaw. After falling ill, Paul was separated from his parents, but was helped to escape by the Polish resistance. He eventually made it to England, where he earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of London, before moving to Cheadle with his wife Joan. He was one of the first Liberal councillors to represent the Cheadle area and did so for four decades.
During his time on the council, Paul held a many positions, including on the equal opportunities special panel and the social inclusion and community cohesion working party. His experience so early on in life drove his passion to prioritise inclusion and community in Cheadle, and he also fought tirelessly for refugees in our region. Paul knew more than anyone just how important it was to be the voice for those who could not defend themselves. I was deeply honoured to replace Paul on Stockport council, and still to this day I try to ensure that I live up to his legacy. I miss him dearly.
It is no secret that hate crimes have risen year on year, misinformation continues to spread like wildfire online, and politics is becoming increasingly polarised. I visited the Community Security Trust earlier this week and heard directly about the work and resource that goes into ensuring that Jewish communities are protected. But heartbreakingly, the Heaton Park synagogue attack on Yom Kippur just three months ago shows that despite every effort to ensure people are safe and secure, the evil of antisemitism poses a real and murderous threat to our Jewish communities.
The latest statistics, published in October, showed that Jewish people had a higher rate of religious hate crimes targeted towards them than any other faith group. We have a duty today to remember, reflect and take action to stamp out this hatred now. Martin Hyman highlights that his grandparents, like many others, believed that civilisation, culture and the rule of law would protect them. But that was not the case. The Holocaust was not a sudden collapse of morality, but the end point of an insidious process in which discrimination was legalised, exclusion enforced, and dehumanisation made routine by ordinary people.
Education plays a critical role in responding to that. Organisations such as the Northern Holocaust Education Group and the My Voice project work to ensure that survivor testimony and lived experience continue to reach schools and communities. The Holocaust Centre North provides a permanent exhibition, learning programmes and an archive rooted in local survivor and refugee stories, helping young people and the wider public understand how a global atrocity unfolded through ordinary lives.
When people feel connected and invested in common values, they are better able to work together to address division and tackle hatred. The Common Ground award is an important initiative that goes some way in supporting that aim, and I hope that the Government will keep on funding it. The Government must also publish the community cohesion strategy that was promised last year, so that communities can work together to confront all forms of extremism by building understanding and trust.
Britian is a country of shared values and it has a history of being a nation that offers a hand to those in need. We must never forget that and must continuously pursue that aim. We celebrate the idea that people in our country should be able to live free from discrimination, and that no one’s rights or dignity should ever be taken away or compromised because of who they are, where they come from or what they believe. We must not lose sight of that, even though there are some who seek to undermine it.
A Jewish man in Manchester recently said to the Manchester Evening News,
“My daughter, she wears the Star of David but she puts it away…Ours are the only children that go to schools behind fences with guards.”
That cannot continue, so we must revert to our shared values, celebrate our differences and call out all forms of hatred and bigotry. “Never again” cannot rest on remembrance alone. It requires conscious action, every day. Holocaust Memorial Day offers an opportunity to reflect on not only what happened, but the responsibility we all have to ensure that the legacy of people like Paul Porgess never fades.
“To this day I've never touched sprouts again.”
Ike was just 13 when his family were lined up in the town square alongside other Jews. He saw his mother, sister, and brother led away by men with rifles. Later he found out they were likely sent to Treblinka, an extermination camp. At Birkenau, Ike’s job was to take bodies from gas chambers to the crematoriums. He said,
“At Birkenau they had four chimneys and they were glowing 24 hours a day, day and night.”
That is invaluable testimony to the children of Rochdale from someone who was there. Someone whose story cannot be denied, and someone who we still remember with great fondness. Despite his passing, Ike’s testimony lives on because his talk to the students was captured on video and is shown by the school every year, thanks to the great efforts of the excellent teachers, such as the Holocaust education lead at Falinge Park, Adele Turner.
Falinge Park has legacy beacon status as one of the schools under the umbrella of the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education, and has developed a special Holocaust ambassadors and youth champions programme. Its youth champions are year 9 pupils who design and lead the extracurricular lunch time and afterschool sessions on the Holocaust for younger children in the school—beautifully bridging generations even within their school, which is the theme of this year’s memorial.
Last week, Greater Manchester’s commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day featured a video of Falinge Park high school pupils Abiha Imran, Willow Greenwood and Dylan Ogden, as they joined Andy Burnham to interview Tomi Komoly, another Holocaust survivor. Tomi revealed he had spoken to 27,000 students in his 10 years of work with the Holocaust Educational Trust—27,000 students who will remember his story. His advice to the next generation was simple. He said,
“the one word that immediately pops into my mind is tolerance. Just look at other people in the world and accept that we each have our own way of living and habits…just be respectful of that, and live peacefully side by side.”
This year has shown that antisemitism is not just the world’s oldest hatred, but very much a current one, fed by extremists that blame Jews across the globe for the actions of Israel’s Government. The Bondi Beach attack was truly appalling, but in the north-west, we will never forget the Heaton Park synagogue attack on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. We remember Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, who were killed in that attack on that dark day.
Marc Levy, who many of us in this place know, is Manchester’s Jewish Representative Council leader, and his father Alan, is a chairman of the synagogue. They were deeply affected by that incident and the loss of their friends. Alan recently recalled how Adrian Daulby leapt up from his seat and ran the length of the synagogue to help them hold shut the front doors from the terror attack, before he was shot and killed.
It is truly disgusting that within hours of that attack, a local councillor in Rochdale shared on his Facebook page an article called, “False flag…could the Manchester synagogue attack be orchestrated?” which is an antisemitic dog whistle, as clear as day. But there are glimmers of light amid the darkness. Marc Levy told me that his children marked their B’nai Mitzvah at Heaton Park recently—a very powerful moment of resilience and remembering.
Teaching about not just the Nazi Holocaust but genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur has been part of the national curriculum for 35 years. Hatred based on race or religion, with victims scapegoated for sins they never committed, demonised, blamed, and punished for things that had nothing to do with them, becomes a narrative that curdles into deadly extremism. Our school children are taught of that danger. But with young people online more than ever, it is not what happens in the classroom that really worries many of us, but what happens outside it. The potential for them to come across antisemitic content and Holocaust denial and distortion—conspiracy theories that the Holocaust never happened or antisemitic theories that it was orchestrated and faked by Jewish people or Israel—is greater than ever.
Meanwhile, we have had regular debate on xAI’s Grok in this House in recent weeks. The AI tool has not only denigrated and degraded women, but generated multiple antisemitic comments, including praise for Hitler, denying the scope of the Holocaust and using so-called Jewish-sounding surnames in the context of hate speech. I hope that Ministers will engage with the Antisemitism Policy Trust to see how the Online Safety Act 2023 can actually crack down on such memes on Reddit and other online platforms.
As others have said, Holocaust Memorial Day is also a time to remember all the Roma and Sinti people, gay men, disabled people, political opponents and others murdered by the Nazi killing machine. We also remember all those affected by the subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia.
Speaking of Bosnia, it was a truly humbling experience to visit the Srebrenica memorial centre and cemetery in Bosnia last year. In July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Serb paramilitaries driven by religious, nationalist and ethnic hatred to commit the worst genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. I went to pay my respects and meet the incredible Mothers of Srebrenica campaign group, and to see the very moving testimony in the memorial centre itself.