Leaders of Anglo-Jewry are about to begin a long-term campaign to spread knowledge of the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish people. The campaign, sponsored by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is intended to counteract ignorance about the Holocaust and the attempts of present-day anti-Semites to minimize it or claim that it never happened.
A two-tier working party has been set up to supplement the educational work carried out in Israel by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in Jerusalem, One committee, headed by Prof. Chimen Abramsky, head of the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at University College, London, will work in the universities. The other, headed by Henry Lewis, an executive of Marks and Spencer, will operate within the Jewish community.
Prof. Abramsky told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his committee hopes to arrange for a leading Israeli scholar in Holocaust studies to take up an appointment in Britain next October for a semester. It also plans a series of seminars, lectures and film-shows in universities during the next academic year. At present, the main public memorial for victims of the Holocaust is the annual public remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising held every April. Abramsky supports it but believes that it is “marginal.”
Both among Jews and non-Jews in Britain, he says, there is insufficient awareness of what Nazi Germany did to the Jewish people in Europe. Few even realize that the Nazis had their own well-advanced plans for dealing with the Jewish population in Britain once they had invaded it.
Similar Holocaust committees have been set up recently in the United States, Canada and Australia. The original impetus for all of them came from Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem.
Other members of Abramsky’s committee of academicians include Judge Israel Finestein, vice-chairman; Dr. David Patterson; and Prof. Bernard Wasserstein of Oxford University. Two non-Jewish historians are Dr. John Fox and Dr. Gisela Lebzelter-Volz, a West German. They will hold their first full meeting at the end of April.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
