The People of the Beach
Journeys to Freedom After the Holocaust
By Rosie Whitehouse
2 February 2021

On Thursday 3 December 2020 at 8.30pm, Yad Vashem UK Foundation, via Zoom, hosted Wendy Holden, the best-selling British author of more than thirty books, and, journalist for 18 years, including a decade at the Daily Telegraph and Eva Clarke BEM, who shared her intense, powerful and moving account and experience.

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A historical detective story that sets out to uncover the truth behind what happened to leading Nazi Otto von Wächter.

On Wednesday 8 July 2020 at 8.00pm, Yad Vashem UK Foundation, via Zoom, hosted Mala Tribich MBE in conversation with Maurice Helfgott, the son of Sir Ben Helfgott, Holocaust survivor and Mala’s brother.

The discussion was led by Simon Bentley, Chairman of Yad Vashem UK Foundation and was attending by approximately 16 people.

Many of you know the story of the death camps – Auschwitz, Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Treblinka.  What you might not know is the story of the Jewish resistance to the horrors of the death camps – of the courageous men and women who dared to make a stand and fight.

This book also tells a story of ‘Din’ meaning, ‘judgement’ in Hebrew.

In 1945, after the war, a small group of Jews formed this secret organisation to ensure the Nazis should know the pain to torture and brutality suffered by over 6 million Jews.  Many powerful Nazis died at their hands – and then they worked out the most daring plan of all, a scheme to poison the water supply to a quarter of a million German homes.

Margaret Hodge was Minister for Children in 2003, before becoming Minister of State for Culture and Tourism in 2005. In 2010 she was elected Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee where she served until 2015. Since 2018, Margaret has been Chair of Council at Royal Holloway, University of London. Margaret is a strong advocate for Holocaust Education and the awareness of antisemitism, confronting Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in parliament on this.

Jews who fled Hitler and changed the world. The heroic story of Rezsö Kasztner, the “Hungarian Oskar Schindler” who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis, only to be accused of collaboration and

On 25 September the Yad Vashem UK Foundation and National Portrait Gallery celebrated the Gallery’s acquisition of a bronze sculpture of Sir Ben Helfgott,

‘And God Saw That It Was Bad’ was composed by the author in Terezin as a surprise birthday present for his wife, Irena, and was produced with the conspiratorial artistic assistance of his young daughter Helga.  Both Irena and Helga survived the Holocaust.

To mark the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp by the British Army, a special screening of the documentary “No Asylum – The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story” was held at the Kinloss Synagogue in Finchley, north London on 15 April 2019.

Luciana, who has been a target of antisemitic abuse on social media, and has experienced antisemitism coming from within elements of the Labour Party, has bravely and publicly spoken out in Westminster against these injustices. 

Luciana acknowledged the important work being done by Yad Vashem UK Foundation and pledged to do whatever she can to support Yad Vashem, to fight racism, to tackle myths, to promote the truth, to honour the survivors, and to remember the six million who perished.

‘The need to tell our story to “the rest”, to make “the rest” participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. This book has been written to satisfy this need.

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the S.S. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to and obtain absolution from – a Jew.

The incredible story of the Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist and the woman he loved. Lale Sokolov is well-dressed, a charmer, a ladies’ man. He is also a Jew. On the first transport from Slovakia to Auschwitz in 1942, Lale immediately stands out to his fellow prisoners.

Ben Helfgott MBE was sculpted in front of a live audience as part of a series of sculptures being created by Leeds-born Frances Segelman, who has sculpted HM The Queen, HRH Prince Philip and HRH Prince Charles.

Warsaw, September 1939. For twelve-year-old best friends, Stefan and Marcus, the zoo is their playground. Stefan lives with his family at the zoo and has grown up with the animals and their keepers. But Marcus is Jewish, and when Nazi troops invade Warsaw their world is torn apart. Against all odds and at enormous risk, their fathers devise a wild scheme to protect Stefan’s family and other Jews. But boys will be boys, and a rebellious act of revenge threatens everyone.

A profound and profoundly important book. A moving personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Our guest speaker for the event was Sir Eric Pickles, the British Government’s Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues.  Sir Eric has been at the forefront of British politics for a remarkable four decades.

In this now classic Holocaust memoir, Simcha Bunem Unsdorfer recounts his survival of the Nazi camps. Clinging fiercely to his faith in God, the nineteen year old Unsdorfer faced the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald with courage and moral defiance, a testament to the abiding strength of the Jewish spirit.

On a grey afternoon in 1932, a Stuttgart classroom is stirred by the arrival of a newcomer. Middle-class Hans is intrigued by the aristocratic new boy, Konradin, and before long they become best friends. It’s a friendship of the greatest kind, of shared interests and long conversations, of hikes in the German hills and growing up together.

Mona Golabek, the Los Angeles-based pianist, told her mother’s story through music at a fundraising dinner organised by Yad Vashem UK Foundation. She had been taught the piano by her Austrian mother, Lisa Jura,

Sent to Auschwitz on the first Jewish transport, Rena Kornreich survived the Nazi death camps for over three years. While there she was reunited with her sister Danka. Each day became a struggle to fulfil the promise Rena made to her mother when the family was forced to split apart–a promise to take care of her sister

In 2016, 180 books of Rena’s Promise, by Heather Dune Macadam, was sent to JFS and read by the year 9 + students.  This was set up together with Simon Rinkoff

In 2016, 180 books of Rena’s Promise, by Heather Dune Macadam, was sent to JFS and read by the year 9 + students.  This was set up together with Simon Rinkoff and the English Department.

Private viewing of the works of Gustav Metzger followed by a Q&A with Andrew Wilson and Clive Phillpot at Tate Britain On 11 November 2015 Yad Vashem UK Foundation organised a private viewing of the works of Gustav Metzger, the refugee escaping Germany in 1939, who was an artist and political activist who developed the […]

It was when he saw his German parents’ reaction to the Israeli flag at the Munich Olympics and two days later, their reaction when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered, that Bernd Wollschlaeger realised that the glaring lack of knowledge he had of his father’s wartime history was significant.

On 20 May 2014, a lunchtime event was held at BDO in Baker Street with guest speakers Tami Raveh and Miki Goldman. Tami, is the daughter of Gideon Hausner the prosecuting Attorney General at the Eichmann trial. Miki was one of the two formal witnesses of Eichmann’s execution and the disposal of his ashes.

Our guest speaker, Dr. David Silberklang, Senior Historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Editor-in-Chief of Yad Vashem Studies, spoke to over 100 guests..

A book launch was held at the LJCC marking the Yad Vashem UK Foundation sponsorship of the publication of two Yad Vashem books. ‘Postcards of a Little Boy’ & ‘The End! Radom & Szydlowiec in the Eyes of a German Photographer’.