Belmont shul has worked hard this year for a programme to build community relations and create coalitions of local people to fight hate crime of any kind. Earlier in the month we heard from Hope not Hate on the risks of violence from the Far Right. This week for two days the shul hosted its sixth annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration event for local high schools. 300 students attended from Hatch End High, The Sacred Heart Language College, Shaftesbury High and Whitefriars. Thirty volunteers from Belmont were involved in taking workshops and helping to run the event. The aim was to motivate these young people to ensure that the horrendous crimes of racism and victimisation committed during the Holocaust and more recent genocides are neither forgotten, nor repeated.

The students listened in awed silence to Holocaust survivors Hannah Lewis MBE, Zigi Shipper BEM and Mala Tribich MBE as they shared their personal experiences of how they survived the horrors of the concentration camps and the death marches. Helen Stone told her mother’s story. At the end of their session, each of the speakers lit a memorial candle for the six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, who died in the Holocaust. The students wrote post cards sharing how much they had learned and how much they were moved by what they had heard.

by David Lerner