Plenary, 26 Jan 2005

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Official Report 453KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Our first item of business is time for reflection, which is led today by Dr Kenneth Collins, the president of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council.

Tomorrow is Holocaust memorial day, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. People from all over the country will be gathering for the Scottish ceremony in Hamilton, focusing on survivors, liberators and rebuilding lives. However, a memorial day is more than just a ceremony, and South Lanarkshire will be hosting a series of events to ensure that the unique lessons of the Holocaust are passed on to future generations.

We have the good fortune in Scotland to have some outstanding people who survived the torments of evil and rebuilt their lives in this country. After their liberation, few survivors shared their stories, as if the murder of their people was too much to bear. As time has passed and lives have, indeed, been rebuilt, they have recalled their ordeals and given thanks for their reception in Scotland. It is our duty to remember their stories.

Growing up in post-war Scotland, I thought that the places that my grandparents had fled from a century ago, from an earlier era of anti-Semitism, in Tsarist Russia, seemed remote. Last year, I visited the Ukrainian village where my grandfather was born and said the Jewish memorial prayer in a ravine near the village at the monument to the 44 Jewish villagers who were killed there by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941. The chill of that moment was softened by the knowledge that the local high school had, uniquely, researched the story of the final days of their destroyed Jewish community, so that the painful past could be understood.

When we consider past and present tragedies, both natural and man-made, we often find it hard to discern the spark of the divine in our world. When Ernest Levy, a survivor of Auschwitz and the first Jewish speaker at the Scottish Parliament's time for reflection, was asked where God had been, he replied humbly that God had been with him and the other prisoners, experiencing their pain.

In recent weeks, we have seen that, when humanity is affected, citizens around the world feel the call to help and to show that there is a common, shared bond. We can mourn the fact that such a worldwide mission did not happen 60 years ago, but we can rejoice that today there is some hope in an imperfect world. For that we can truly thank God.