Having led the service on Holocaust Memorial Day earlier that Sunday morning, on the afternoon of Sunday 28 January 2024 I joined Chris, another member of our congregation, for the Holocaust Memorial Day event at Newcastle City Library. Organised by the Representative Council of North East Jewry and various local groups, with support from the Holocaust Memorial Trust, this year’s theme was ‘The Fragility of Freedom’. As the photograph shows, it was very well attended, to the extent that many of us had to sit on the balcony as the library’s ground floor was completely full.

Rabbi’s Aaron Lipsey and Sybil Sheridan lit the memorial candle and recited prayers, followed by an address from the Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Cllr Veronica Dunn*. The keynote speakers was Susie Kaufman, who spoke on ‘How My Three Refugee Parents [her mother, father, and stepfather] Lost, and Eventually Found, Freedom’. Her deeply moving tale of her parents’ experiences leaving behind persecution in Nazi Germany, and what it meant to them to be given refuge in England, held everyone silent.

One of the highlights of the event though, was definitely not silent, as a choir of local school children performed the Song for HMD 2024, ‘The Fragility of Freedom’. Having sung in schools choirs myself (a depressingly long time ago!), I have to admire the skill of both the teachers and the children; they gave a very high standard of musical performance that must have taken a long time to perfect. Following a presentation on what life is like for young Jewish people at present, we closed the event with a reprise of the children singing.

I lit a memory candle at the front, thinking of all the victims of genocide, including those I had spoken about at my service earlier that day, in which I focussed on the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. Chris and I journeyed upstairs for refreshments, and also to look at the photography display there, ‘Flashes of Memory’, on the Jewish ghettoes in Nazi Germany. He shared an experience he had had of challenging racial prejudice at an event in Newcastle city centre; I contemplated some of the descriptions of propaganda and the mindset of those who produce it, and was uncomfortably reminded of several contemporary demogogic politicians. Another quote came to my mind as we departed the event. “The price of freedom is constant vigilance”.

* For those wondering, the Lord Mayor of Newcastle is a ceremonial role, and thus the title is always ‘the Lord Mayor’ regardless of the gender of the person currently holding it.