THE chairman of Bradford Synagogue has reflected on the "insane cruelty" of the Nazi regime as the district commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day.

This year the event, called Be the Light in the Darkness, takes place online, today at 11am. Organised by Creative arts project 6 million+ and Creative Scene, with Bradford and Kirklees councils and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre, it is on youtube.com/channel/UC3P5--UHuY1QNI3IQuMKhKQ/videos

The event remembers the six million murdered Jewish people and other victims of Nazi persecution in the Second World War, and further genocide victims in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur (Sudan) and Myanmar.

Council leaders, faith representatives and members of community projects will share reflections, candle lighting and stories depicted through puppetry. Iby Knill, a 97-year-old Auschwitz survivor, will light the first candle of remembrance from home.

Bradford Synagogue chairman Rudi Leavor came to Bradford in 1937, aged 11, after escaping Nazi Germany with his parents and sister. In 2017 he was awarded the British Empire Medal for interfaith work with Muslim and other community leaders.

A member of the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association, he sings Hebrew mourning prayer El Male Rachamim at Holocaust Memorial events each year. Mr Leavor said: “January 27 is traditionally remembered to commemorate the liberation of the most infamous of murderous events in the history of mankind. Auschwitz symbolises dozens of such camps situated in Europe under Nazi occupation, in which an estimated six million people were mercilessly done to death merely because they did not fit into the ideology of a master race.

"These people were physically or mentally handicapped people, communists, trade unionists, homosexuals, Roma, Sinti and predominantly Jews. The process of their murder was inflicted with insane cruelty. Children were separated from their parents, couples were separated, they were deceived into entering what were described as showers but were in fact gas chambers, made to stand on the edge of wide tranches in which there were already corpses, then shot so that they conveniently fell into those trenches.

“For about 20 years after the war the Holocaust, as it became known, was not talked about because it was too horrible a subject to discuss. Only then were tentative feelers put about to explore the history and execution of the tyrant’s plan and the absolute enormity of the event exposed, discussed and analysed so that today the Holocaust has been researched and commemorated to the nth degree.

“The least we can do is to remember the victims every day by at least the survivors and on one day by all.

"Fortunately successive German Governments, taking the German people with them, have acknowledged their ancestors’ behaviour and have made amends so far as this is possible."