Halifax school hosts Calderdale Interfaith Committee Holocaust Memorial Day
A Halifax school was asked to host this year’s Calderdale Interfaith Committee Holocaust Memorial Day event as part of a programme of commemorations taking place across the UK.
The day saw North Halifax Grammar School (NHGS) welcome guest speakers including Professor PB Anand - NHGS school member, trustee of Calderdale Interfaith Council and head of the Division of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford; Councillor Steven Leigh – Mayor of Calderdale; and Michael Baim- Jewish member of the Calderdale Interfaith Steering Group.
Year 9 students were also invited to attend the moving, informative and engaging experience marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Two NHGS Sixth Form students who have been on one of the the school’s annual Holocaust Memorial Trust visits to Auschwitz shared their experiences, describing the trips as deeply emotional and thought-provoking and allowing them to develop a far more personal understanding of the Holocaust.
Students then led a poignant ceremony, lighting candles in memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of others killed under Nazi persecution and in more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, as well as wider victims of persecution across the world.
Eleven candles were lit – for the Jewish community; political opponents; the disabled community; the LGBTQ+ community; the Polish and Slavic community; prisoners of war; victims of religious persecution; racially diverse victims of genocide; the Sudanese community; the Cambodian community; and the Bosnian community.
The event closed with the words of Anne Frank: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”