A new exhibition on how sport has fought racism was launched at Chelsea Football Club this week on Holocaust Memorial Day.
Designed by the Jewish Ethics Project and Yad Vashem UK, the resource will travel to other football clubs during the year and will be available for schools and shuls.
It is the first exhibition produced by JEP, which was established last year. “It explores the role sport has played in challenging racism and exclusion, and the ways prejudice has been confronted, and at times defeated, by courageous individuals, including Black and Jewish sportsmen,” a spokesperson for the group explained.
“It feels particularly timely in light of recent incidents of antisemitism connected to football culture… The exhibition offers both historical depth and a clear moral framework for thinking about responsibility in sport today.”
Students from Hendon School presented the exhibition to an audience that included Chelsea staff, members of the Chelsea Foundation and Chelsea Supporters’ Trust, as well as members of the club’s Jewish Supporters’ Group.
“That inter-communal dimension is very much by design,” JEP said. “Our mission is to bring Jewish ethical thinking into conversation with the wider society – not as abstraction, but through lived examples, shared spaces and contemporary challenges.”
Michael Cornall, Chelsea FC’s head of supporter relations, said it was “a truly humbling experience to host the Chelsea Jewish Supporters’ Group to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day and note the positive impact that sport has made in tackling racism and antisemitism.
“We are proud of the impact and the role that our supporter groups play in both the local community as well as the fan base in addressing these issues.”
Among the stories featured in the exhibition are the triumph of the legendary Black American sprinter Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics and Aston Villa’s tour of Germany tour years later and the careers of post-War Jewish sports figures such as Hungarian football coach Bela Guttmann and Olympic swimming champion Mark Spitz.
Elsewhere in London, three Fulham FC players, including first-team midfielder Josh King, interviewed Holocaust survivor Barbara Frankiss, who was born in Warsaw a year before the Second World War started. She made it through the war by hiding in an apartment outside the Warsaw Ghetto, in brutal conditions, and then by being taken in by a kind police officer and his wife. She reunited with her father, the only other surviving member of her family, after the war.
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