Churches across the diocese are standing with our Jewish friends to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which is marked as Holocaust Memorial Day.
Bradford Cathedral held a special address on Sunday January 27, given by Lilian Black, Chair of the Trustees of the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre at Huddersfield University.
Her late father, Eugene, was deported from his home in Hungary in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz.
He lost most of his family to the Holocaust but survived concentration camps and forced labour to make a new life in the UK.
Lilian said: “The anniversary is important because it marks symbolically the beginning of the liberation of the camps, and the awful revelations at first hand of the horrors which left all humanity with the challenge of wondering how such horrors were possible.
“These crimes against humanity were carried out by ordinary men and women in a terrible coalescing of conditions where genocide became part of a civilised society’s racial ‘rationale’, which allowed millions to be murdered systematically in a German Nazi state sponsored act over years across the whole of occupied Europe.
“My hope is for people to understand better the circumstances which led to the Holocaust and to see the relevance for today and how every person can make a difference in their own lives and those of others and to have the courage to stand together.”
Other churches are also marking the day, to remember both the victims of the Holocaust and those killed in other atrocities committed since.
Ripon Cathedral are holding a special service at 1.30pm on Holocaust Memorial Day itself, to remember those killed in the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.
Schoolchildren will light candles to create a Star of David on the floor of the Cathedral.
Halifax Minster are meeting for Holocaust Memorial Day at 6.00 pm, at a service with music, addresses and a joint memorial of the Holocaust of 75 years ago in Germany and 25 years ago in Bosnia.
UPDATE 29/1/2020: Please see below for some pictures from Ripon Cathedral's and Halifax Minster's commemorations, including the Lord Lieutenant of West Yorkshire, Ed Anderson, lighting a candle at the Minster.
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