Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Bishop of Lichfield Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Lichfield]

My Lords, it is an honour to participate in this debate. I anticipate hearing many more thoughtful and powerful contributions like those we have already heard, and look forward to hearing the words of the noble Lord, Lord Katz, who will follow me. I congratulate him on making his maiden speech today, along with the noble Lord, Lord Evans, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt.

I declare my interest as a former chair of the Council of Christians and Jews. With that in mind, I was very glad to see on the speakers’ list today my friend the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, who shared with me as a trustee there. I look forward to what he has to say.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the lives of the 6 million Jewish men, women and children, along with other groups, who were murdered by the Nazis. This year has been particularly significant, as it marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. As the Minister pointed out, as each year goes by, the number of living people who have their own personal accounts of surviving the Holocaust diminishes. It is the responsibility of us all to ensure that their lives do not simply become statistics in a history book but that they are remembered as people, each with their own stories and experiences.

In that regard, I commend to your Lordships the Forever Project, an interactive experience that I visited at the Beth Shalom National Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire. This project gives people the opportunity to hear from and to have a question and answer session with a hologram of a Holocaust survivor. Through the use of AI and voice recognition, it is an innovative way to preserve their memories and to enable future generations to learn about their experiences. Those memories serve as a reminder and a warning of where anti-Semitism can lead when left unchallenged, and we must be alive to prevent such atrocities recurring. This is why commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day each year is so important.

It is a matter of fact and a matter of shame that, through a distortion of Christian theology, the Church in almost all its branches has historically contributed to the immense suffering and injustice experienced by Jewish people over the ages. It follows that the Church must have a vital role and duty, in partnership with others, in actively standing against anti-Semitism. This is a major task for our renewed theological understanding today.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “For a Better Future”, but to build such a future we cannot be passive; it requires commitment and action from each one of us. Genocide is not inevitable, nor does it happen overnight. It is gradual, beginning with the othering of those whom we consider different from ourselves, and the normalisation of acts of discrimination and hatred. While the horrors of Auschwitz move further into history, sadly, anti-Semitism does not.

One persuasive analogy of anti-Semitism is that of a virus which mutates over time and reinfects society in different forms. The most recent statistics published by the Community Security Trust, cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, underline the dimensions of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in our own time, in our own country. The use of social media has only fuelled this, exposing more people to hateful content and enabling anti-Semitism to spread further and faster.

This is preventable. We can choose to shape a better future, built on our shared humanity and on strengthening the fabric of our communities through mutual understanding and trust. We cannot afford to be complacent bystanders. We must actively challenge anti-Semitism and all discrimination wherever we see it, to seek understanding rather than fearing those who are different from us. We must personally question the small remarks, whether they be so-called jokes or throwaway comments, which can appear insignificant but can so easily build to destructive hate on a greater scale.

Interfaith dialogue plays an important role in this, as well as being an example of how those of different beliefs can come together to find common ground and connection. On Holocaust Memorial Day this year, the Council of Christians and Jews organised a profound morning of testimony, reflection and prayer as a testament to the power and significance of that dialogue.

I finish with some words that Rabbi Charley Baginsky shared at that meeting. She said,

“Optimism, in this sense, is not the denial of pain, but the radical choice to imagine and work toward something better, something more just, something that can heal the divisions we face. This vision of a better future is not a distant dream—it is a call to action. It is a call to reject the forces of hate and division, and to embrace the transformative power of empathy, of connection, of community”.


Let us not forget the horrors of the past, but let the memories of those who experienced them spur us on to build a better future, free from hate and division.