Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Official Report 925KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leaders are Angela Shapiro and Claire Singerman from the gathering the voices project, a partnership including the Glasgow Jewish community, Glasgow Caledonian University and sense over sectarianism.

Good afternoon, Presiding Officer, members of the Parliament, ladies and gentlemen.

We would like to give you a message about remembrance and hope. A memorial service called Yizkor—meaning “remember”—is recited as part of the Jewish prayer service, four times during the year, including the festival of Passover, which begins on Friday 6 April. It is based on the Jewish belief in the eternity of the soul. Although a soul can no longer do good deeds after death, it can gain merit through the positive actions of the living.

In many congregations, the following prayer is included. It refers to those who died in the Holocaust.

“May the Lord remember the souls of the holy and pure ones who were killed, murdered, slaughtered, burned, drowned, and strangled for the sanctification of the Name ... may their souls be bound in the Bond of Life, together with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah; and together with the other righteous men and women in the Garden of Eden.”

As well as serving as a memorial to the dead, the Yizkor prayers incorporate an undertaking to give a donation to charity in memory of our loved ones.

Our own response to that has been twofold. We wish to remember those who died as a result of Nazi racism and educate the young so that such terrible things can never happen again. We also want to celebrate those who survived and flourished, despite their past, and highlight their contribution to Scottish society. For those reasons, we have commenced the project gathering the voices, the aim of which is to gather testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

We have learned much from listening to the survivors and would like to share some of those lessons with you.

First, that we are very lucky to be citizens of Scotland and must never take for granted our freedoms and our many good and compassionate friends and neighbours.

Second, that it is possible to move forward, however bleak and distressing life has been. My late mother-in-law, a survivor of Auschwitz and slave labour, encapsulated that for us. When asked in old age how she occupied herself, she invariably answered, “Thinking beautiful thoughts.”

Third, that asylum seekers can come to Scotland without family, friends, money or even a word of English yet grow up to be valuable and honourable Scots men and women.

And surely that is worth celebrating.