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Britain's Holocaust Memorial Works for a Peaceful Future
Who is your brother's keeper if not you? Making Memory: Creating Britain's First Holocaust Centre by Stephen D. Smith. ISBN: 0-9536280-9-4
Stephen and James Smith are brothers who were raised in a comfortable English home that nurtured a pleasant form of Christianity within it. Their lives began to change when as boys, they visited Israel and met the West Wall; the most revered shrine in the Jewish world. At some point, Stephen formed a question in his mind that ran something like this: "If Christ was a Jew, and these people are here, praying in His language, why do Christians know so little about this and why is Christianity so removed from a Jewish experience?"
Making Memory is a tale of the answer to that question. The brothers eventually formed Beth Shalom, Britain’s first memorial to the millions of Jews murdered during the Hitler years, and brought a greater understanding to Englishmen of what these people endured. Beth Shalom is not merely a museum or a guilt ridden memorial, but as Smith puts it, a sign of responsibility. By comemmorating the Jewish dead of the Second World War period, Beth Shalom tries to answer the question, "Who is your brother’s keeper?" More pointedly, Smith works to undo the centuries of bitterness and cruel divisions between the Christians and the Jews.
As one might expect, the efforts of the brothers have been fraught with challenges on many levels. Neither of them seems to relish the spotlight or material benefits that seem to follow those who wear their religiosity on their sleeve for all to see or financially support through tax-deductible charitable donations, and their humility and dedication to a world where fewer lives are wasted in war, pogrom, ethnic cleansing and futile massacre of targeted populations stand in contrast to the status quo of so many faiths whose followers did so little to protest the displacement and murder of the Jews in Europe seventy years ago—or for that matter, stand against the massacre in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Iraq—well, you get the picture.
The brothers Smith would say that Beth Shalom is an attempt to salvage something from the many centuries of discord, dissonance, destruction and deviation and begin to create a world perhaps more in sync with something that a revolutionary Jewish carpenter used to talk about in Judea a long time ago—that there is a way forward to a better world that depends on love and being more fully human in one’s Father’s image. That message is as stunning in its simplicity and complexity as it ever was and two British men are giving their lives and futures toward making that happen.
Making Memory is a challenging book that deserves to be read especially by those who have recoiled from the tawdry glitz of religion as sideshow. There may be meaning here. Try it.
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