Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I will begin by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Austin of Dudley, who sadly is not able to be in his place today. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath, reminded us just a few minutes ago in her excellent speech, Ian is the son of a Holocaust survivor. It was he who helped me understand the significance of this day, long before either he or myself were Members of your Lordships’ House.

Unlike my present diocese of Manchester, Dudley, where I was then the bishop and the noble Lord, Lord Austin, was an MP, did not have a very large Jewish population. Nevertheless, at his instigation, every year we sent two young people from Dudley College of Technology to Auschwitz. They reported back to our annual Holocaust Memorial Day event that was held in the college, where they told very moving stories of what they had seen and how it had made them feel. Their witness, alongside the testimony of Holocaust survivors, helped inspire young people who were born almost half a century after the Holocaust to understand why we today must be constantly on the vigil against those voices that seek to deny the common and equal humanity and dignity of every single human being. Those who denigrate, despise and ultimately seek to destroy those whom I, as a Christian, will always declare as being created in the very image of God.

I now live in Salford, in the midst of the largest Jewish community outside of London. The boundary of the eruv, which permits many of my Jewish neighbours to undertake tasks such as pushing wheelchairs and prams on the sabbath and other holy days, is my garden wall.

This year, I have been delighted to see the success of the Holocaust Memorial Day schools exhibition held in Manchester Cathedral. It features the work of Church of England primary schools across the whole of Greater Manchester from many culturally, racially and religiously diverse communities. The children responded to key themes of the Holocaust in a number of ways. Some of them created origami paper cranes as prayers for peace; others reflected on Pavel Friedman’s poem, The Butterfly, which was actually written in a concentration camp. There was a re-creation of the pile of children’s shoes from the children who lost their lives at Auschwitz—that was very difficult to look at—and a collection of human portraits from many different cultures to celebrate our differences.

Meanwhile, local authority Holocaust Memorial Day events in Greater Manchester, including one that I attended in Manchester Town Hall, had local speakers who were Holocaust survivors or from their families. Respect was shown to them at these events by members of all our main faith communities: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jain. In my role as convenor of the Greater Manchester faith leaders, I have the privilege of leading representatives of all our major faiths. We are good friends and good neighbours.

The multifaith Challenging Hate Forum, which is hosted by my cathedral, undertook its own visit to Auschwitz, led jointly by my dean and Rabbi Warren Elf. My wife was part of that trip in March 2019. We also have vibrant bilateral groups, such as our Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester, where relationships that are forged and sustained over many years prove so vital when we find ourselves in tense times. I am privileged to work closely with the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester & Region, and to use my voice here in your Lordships’ House to raise concerns that it and other faith communities have first prompted me about.

The Church of England teaching document, God’s Unfailing Word, which was published in 2019, speaks of attitudes towards Judaism over many centuries as providing,

“a fertile seed-bed for murderous antisemitism”,

and of the need for Christians to repent of the “sins of the past” towards our Jewish neighbours. It notes the part played by flawed Christian theology in promoting negative stereotypes of Jewish people.

I am grateful to other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and my right reverend friend the Bishop of Lichfield, for reminding us that anti-Semitism did not arise in the 1930s but was nurtured and grown over the preceding two millennia. There can be no overlap between the truth of our witness to Christ, which it is the task of theology to articulate, and the darkness of anti-Semitism. We have a duty as Christians to be alert to the continuation of such stereotyping and to resist it. My right reverend friend was a member of the group that wrote this document, though I note he was too modest to refer to that in his own speech earlier.

Remembering the Holocaust serves as a bulwark against the ever-present forces across the world that seek to resurrect vile, violent and murderous anti-Semitism or to perpetrate fresh genocides against other targeted groups. This year marks 30 years since the Srebrenica massacre, when more than 8,000—mainly men and boys—were killed in just a few days by the Serb forces. I am proud that, in Manchester, we—again together, as all our faiths and others—commemorate Srebrenica Memorial Day each year.

In Britain, we take pride—I take pride—in our pluralistic society, one where people are free to practise their religion and express their identity and where they should be able to live without fear of persecution. But we must never take those freedoms for granted. They are the product of a long history of struggle and sacrifice. Yet, as other noble Lords have said, they remain under attack—even in the UK, even today. We must make sure that atrocities such as the Holocaust never happen again. We must speak up and act up when anti-Semitism, racism or xenophobia happen.

As a schoolboy in Manchester, I studied alongside many fellow pupils who were Jewish. Most of them would have lost family members in the Holocaust. Simply being boys together—we did not have girls in those days in my school, and it still does not—taught me that we were one humanity under the skin. Indeed, the only practical difference between being Jewish or gentile seemed to be that my Jewish friends got to go home a lesson early on winter Friday afternoons.

As others have said, with each anniversary, the memories of the Holocaust slip away from living memory. If we are to hold firm against the evils of fascism and other extreme ideologies—as indeed we must—as each generation of survivors passes on, it is incumbent on all of us to remember the past. Today’s debate plays a vital part in enabling that, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley—a good friend, who does so much excellent work to promote strong relationships between different faiths and communities, and who spoke so strongly and movingly in opening our debate today—for giving us this opportunity to build “For a better future”, to quote the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day.