Holocaust Memorial Day service in St Edmundsbury Cathedral

On 27 January, I was honoured to speak at the Holocaust Memorial Day service at St Edmundsbury Cathedral. We remembered the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and all victims of genocide. Remembrance matters - it is our shared responsibility to carry it forward.

I read the following at the service:

‘We are here to honour the memory of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but also the memory of 57 Jews slaughtered by their neighbours in Bury St Edmunds in March 1190, commemorated by the beautiful steel Teardrop in the Abbey Gardens.

Here, in East Anglia, in Bury St Edmunds, at King’s Lynn and in Norwich, there were important centres of medieval Jewish life. In Norwich in 1144, the Jews were falsely accused of the ritual murder of a boy named William. This is the so-called blood libel, a myth that persisted for centuries and played its part in the growth of antisemitism in the 20th century, living on to this very day.

It was that blood libel which stoked hatred here in Bury, culminating in the vicious massacre of 1190. In the aftermath, Bury became the first town in England to expel the Jews, and exactly 100 years later, in 1290, King Edward expelled all the Jews of England.

So I am here today, not only as the first Labour MP for Bury St Edmunds, but as its first Jewish MP. So I am a Jew who represents a town that almost 1,000 years ago expelled all the Jews. History has come full circle.

It was reported, following the dreadful events of October 2023 and the war in Gaza, that teachers are faced with a dilemma of what to do on Holocaust Memorial Day. It may be simpler not to have an event at all. In 2023, 2,000 schools held Holocaust Memorial Day events. In 2024, 1,200. In 2025, 850. And less this year, almost certainly.

But as the Chief Rabbi said, “as we lose the last survivors to the pages of the history books, how we will we keep our oft repeated promise that we will never forget?”

Let me close with the words of the great medieval poet Mayor of Norwich, written as he fled the country in 1190, the earliest recorded Hebrew poetry ever written in England. “When I hoped for good, evil arrived. Yet I will wait for the light. You are mighty and full of light. You turn darkness into light”.’