Rochdale to host Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration event

Photo: Andrew Teebay/Liverpool Echo

The borough is set to host its annual Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration event in person for the first time since the pandemic.

Returning after taking place virtually in 2021 and 2022, the event will be held at Middleton Arena on Tuesday, January 24.

Rochdale Borough Council and Rochdale Borough Multi-Faith Partnership are hosting the event where candles will be lit in memory of the 11 million Jews and other persecuted groups who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Young people will also take part in the event, demonstrating their learning about the Holocaust which must continue across the generations to keep the memory and lessons alive.

Organiser Robin Parker said: “The Holocaust was unprecedented in its character. It was a genocide which was industrial in both scale and organisation.

“The theme for 2023 is ‘Ordinary People’, exploring how it was ordinary people who were involved in the Holocaust, whether as those persecuted and murdered, or who became the persecutors.  

“Ordinary people were those who put themselves in danger in trying to rescue others and ordinary people, who for whatever personal reasons and fears, were those who stood by.”  

The official date for Holocaust Memorial Day is January 27, as it was the date Russian forces liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps in occupied Poland in 1945.

Commemorative and educational events and activities now take place nationally on and around that date each year.

Robin added: “Parallels will be drawn with other genocides, as despite the world saying ‘Never Again’ the lives of certain groups of people are still identified by some powers, as being worth less than others and many genocides have been perpetrated before and since the Holocaust and still are throughout the world to this day.

“Rochdale has a long-established community of Ukrainians.  They well know how their communities and families suffered in the 1930s under Stalin’s policy of collective farming, where the confiscation of crops led to the death of millions due to forced starvation.

“This is now known as Holodomor. A speaker, from the Rochdale Branch of the Ukrainian Association of Great Britain, will talk about the current situation of the invasion of Ukraine and its effects on ordinary people both there and the community here, today.”

A coach will leave at 6.15pm to take people the short distance to Middleton Memorial Gardens for a short rededication of the Middleton Holocaust Memorial Stone, before returning to the Arena for the Act of Commemoration, which will begin at 7.00 pm.

If you would like a free seat on the bus, please telephone 01706 924821, office hours Monday – Friday, as places are limited on the bus itself.

Alternatively, people can arrive at the Arena in time for the Act of Commemoration at 7.00 pm.  Free refreshments will be available afterwards.