Two years ago, in 2024, Yom HaShoah felt different. Each year, the Jewish community comes together to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust. But that year, our remembrance was shadowed by something we never thought we would witness again – it came just months after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust itself. Grief was no longer only historical. It was immediate, raw, and unrelenting.
I remember speaking to Holocaust survivors who had spent a lifetime believing that such brutality belonged to the past. Many told me they never imagined they would see Jews butchered in this way again in their lifetime. Others spoke, with quiet fear, about what this moment would mean for Jews living in the diaspora.
That Yom HaShoah, I wrote that remembrance alone was not enough. We had a responsibility to confront the antisemitism unfolding around us. There could be no caveats, no context that excused hatred. Carrying a swastika through the streets of London – as we saw during the marches that filled our towns and cities on a regular basis – could never be justified. I asked a simple question: is it really too much to expect that antisemitism has no place in our society?
What has followed since has been worse than anything I could have imagined.
Jews in this country murdered while observing our holiest day. Ambulances run by a Jewish charity set alight in an arson attack. The BBC broadcasting chants of “Death to the IDF” from the stage at Glastonbury Festival. Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv barred from attending a match in Britain’s second city, amid a deeply troubling handling of the situation by West Midlands Police. A Jewish Member of Parliament prevented from visiting a local school. Protesters targeting synagogues, Jewish neighbourhoods and businesses. And most recently, the Jewish community told to “forgive” a man who, only months ago, released a song titled “Heil Hitler” – so that a music festival can turn a profit.
This is not an exhaustive account. It is a highlights reel – and that, in itself, should give us pause.
So this year, as we prepare to gather once again for Yom HaShoah, we do so not only in remembrance, but with clarity.
The Holocaust did not emerge in a vacuum. It was not the beginning of a story – it was its devastating conclusion. The culmination of 2,000 years of antisemitism, of recycled tropes and ever-evolving conspiracy theories that adapted to each age in order to target Jewish communities. This long, dark history ran through the blood libels, the pogroms, the forced conversions and expulsions – each chapter laying the groundwork for what would come.
And that is the uncomfortable truth: the Holocaust was the end of a path. Not an aberration, but a destination.
Today, we find ourselves once again at the early stages of a similar path. The warning signs are there – visible, undeniable, and growing. However, we are early enough that there is still time to act.
That action, however, demands something far more serious than words. It requires those with influence and authority – politicians, the Crown Prosecution Service, broadcasters and yes, festival organisers and the public at large – to make a conscious choice.
A choice to take antisemitism seriously. A choice to defend Britain’s proud tradition as a country where people of all faiths can live, worship and belong in freedom and security. A choice not only to remember those murdered because they were Jewish, but to stand, unequivocally, with the Jewish community today.
This will be uncomfortable for some. It may mean drawing the same hostility that has, for too long, been directed at the Jewish community, especially when confronting antisemitism thinly veiled as antizionism and hatred of Israel.
But that is precisely why it is a choice. A choice between what is easy, and what is right. A choice to stand up for the Jewish people – not when it is convenient, but when it carries a cost.
I do believe in a future where Yom HaShoah returns to what it was always meant to be – a day of remembrance alone. But we are not there yet.
And until we are, it must also serve as a call to action.
Karen Pollock is chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust
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