A poignant day for Jewish families

The 75th anniversary of VE Day was a landmark commemoration for everyone in the UK, albeit with some additional resonance for Jewish communities.

Although the unconditional surrender of the German armies and formal cessation of hostilities May 7-8, 1945, did not end the suffering and trauma of survivors of the Holocaust and their families, it nonetheless marks the day on which that calamitous period which saw the cold blooded slaughter of six million European Jews, finally came to an end.

I know I am speaking for my community when I express the intense gratitude we feel to the Allied forces who brought this critical denouement about.

At the same time we are also proud that there were many of the Jewish faith amongst those forces, also feeling the burden of privation and absence from their families, and contributing to the war effort in many ways, both at home, in Europe, and in far flung places.

My own late father, Gustav Schleider, himself a pre-war refugee from Nuremberg, was amongst them, stationed at one time in West Africa.

I was privileged recently to take possession for the first time of his reissued 1939-1945 War medal, which had been either lost or unclaimed after the war. This coming Armistice Day I shall wear it with pride and think of the sacrifices he and many multitudes of others made, so that peace could be restored.

I am a war baby myself, born around the time when the Nazis’ appalling plans for a ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ had arrived in Hungary and decimated centuries-old communities there in just 12 weeks.

It is humbling to consider the extended period of peace I have been privileged to live through since then in the UK. Even now, as we face new challenges together, we are in a situation so far removed from the terrible privations of the war years and it behoves us all to give thanks for that, particularly on VE day.

Although incredibly serious at their own level, and certainly we have all been touched by tragedy these past few weeks, thankfully the unprecedented challenges we are facing now pale into insignificance by comparison with the tumult and tragedy of the war years, and indeed for many in Europe during the rise of Nazism from 1933.

May we all very soon feel the relief and calm of a post-Covid period as soon as it is safe to do so – and may this VE Day herald the start of that era for us all. Joseph Schleider Interim President, Gateshead Hebrew Congregation