This will comfort survivors

THE JEWISH tradition of remembering goes well beyond a mere mental exercise. For us, memorial requires decisive action and engagement through which we can guarantee that a memory will remain fresh in our minds. That is what gives us certainty that we will never forget.

This is the essence of our objective as we herald this historic announcement. Thanks to the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, no matter what the future holds, we, the British people, will remember.

The knowledge that it imparts and the experiences it will offer will shape the national understanding of the Shoah for generations to come and will inspire a future in which our society holds peace and harmony as its most fundamental values. We will be better placed to have a society which, having internalised the lessons of the past, will stand ready to combat hatred, to take on prejudice and try to stop all forms of intolerance in the future.

This initiative, spearheaded by our government and enthusiastically supported by all political parties and the Mayor of London, provides a vehicle through which we will be able to learn from the past for the sake of the future. I have no doubt that it will win the enthusiastic approval and praise of people right throughout the UK.

And, in particular, there is one extraordinary group of people for whom the announcement is all the more reassuring — our Shoah survivors.

Today we send the strongest possible message to them that long beyond their physical lives on earth we, the British people, will remember what they went through and how the six million perished, in order that, together, we will build and maintain a society with the values of unity, peace and harmony at its heart.