UK’s holocaust survivors and families will be lighting 30,000 candles on Monday night to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The annual UK Yom HaShoah service, which remembers the six million Jews killed in The Second World War, is being livestreamed so families across the country can take part in a simultaneous lighting of yellow candles - each one marking the life of someone who died.
This year, the service, will give extra focus on those who sacrificed their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest single revolt by the ghettocised Jews to fight back against their Nazi guards.
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis will be leading the tributes with the help of Israeli Ambassador for the UK Tzipi Hotovely, 125 dignitaries, survivors and guests at the Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors Centre, in London.
Janine Webber, a survivor from Poland’s Lwów Ghetto (now Lviv, Ukraine); Auschwitz survivor Ivor Perl and Henny Franks, who came here on Kindertransport and turns 100 in June, will be among the speakers, who’ll be able to be seen on the livestream - along with the candle lighting.
Neil Martin, chair of Yom HaShoah UK, believes its important to mark the sacrifice of those who took part in the uprising, despite knowing their likely fate.
“It’s important to show the fightback. It showed a glimmer of hope,” he said. “That the Jewish people didn’t just sit there and succumb.”
In 1942, The SS had taken more than 250,000 Jews from its Nazi-controlled ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, and sent them to Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps, under the guise of a “resettlement programme”.
By 1943, the truth of what had really happened to those who had left had begun to emerge and Jewish resistance groups decided they were not going to let the remaining 50,000 in the Warsaw ghetto be taken without a fight. So when SS officers, armed with orders to round up its final residents, entered the ghetto on April 19 - 80 years ago on Wednesday - they came under fire from resistance fighters using whatever they could find.
Outnumbered and outgunned, the resistance fought on for nearly a month, until the SS were ordered to burn down the ghetto block by block. Some 13,000 Jews were said to have died during the uprising, many burnt alive, compared to less than 150 Germans. One of the only surviving commanders amongst the resistance, Marek Edelman, later revealed they new it was a suicide mission, but made a stand so as “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our [their] deaths”.
Candice Mendes da Costa, who runs the Yellow Candle project for Yom HaShoah hopes thousands of families will now join the livestream to pay their respects.
She said: “We’ve distributed over 30,000 candles to people in the UK so they can get involved from home.
“Each yellow candle comes with the name of someone who was murdered in the Holocaust, where they were born and the age they were when they were murdered.”
With fewer Holocaust survivors alive to tell the tale, Candice says it’s important to keep the legacy going, teaching future generations about the atrocities of the Holocaust and encouraging them to learn from the past.
“This year we’ve included two sunflower seeds with the yellow candle,” she explained. “Once the candle has burned down, we encourage people to keep the tin and plant two sunflower seeds to help remember the past.”
Other events are happening around the country, including services in Manchester (yomhashoahmanchester.org.uk ) and Birmingham. The latter is also staging a free play, Survivors, tomorrow, about people who resettled in the city after surviving the atrocities (bhamnow.com).
There’s also a two-day candle-lighting in Israel for their Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2023. A 90-minute service was also set to be livestreamed from Warsaw Ghetto Square, outside Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, at 5.30pm GMT on Monday.
