Mick Hartley

Very depressing. From the Times – Number of schools marking Holocaust has halved since Oct 7.

More than 2,000 secondary schools around the UK had signed up to events commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in 2023, which takes place on January 27, according to data from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Until that year, those taking part had increased annually since 2019.

But since the terrorist attacks by Hamas, the number of participating schools fell to fewer than 1,200 in 2024 and 854 in 2025 — a reduction of nearly 60 per cent.

You’d think that the October 7th Hamas pogrom would reinforce our shared commitment to remember where antisemitism can lead – but it’s gone the other way. Perhaps we never really meant it.

Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis:

Over the years I have spent a great deal of time talking to Holocaust survivors. All of them are remarkable in their own way but invariably, in the end, they all make the same desperate appeal to me: “Please don’t let the world forget.” Whenever they have done so, I have confidently looked them in the eye and promised that we never would. Now I am forced to ask myself whether that confidence was misplaced.

Honouring Jewish victims of genocide does not diminish compassion for any other people. On the contrary, it enlarges it, because collective memory is not a finite resource. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jewish suffering matters more but that Jewish suffering matters at all. And that when Jews are dehumanised and attacked, it is a sign that our entire society is experiencing a fundamental moral malaise.

My father fought in WW2. I remember him saying how in the future people just wouldn’t believe what happened in the Holocaust. They just wouldn’t believe how such a monstrous thing could happen. Well, we’re getting there.