Number of UK schools marking Holocaust Remembrance Day drops nearly 60% since Oct. 7

The number of British schools commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day has dropped by nearly 60 percent in the past two years, according to a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the annual memorial on January 27.

Observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, had been rising in recent years, with more than 2,000 secondary schools in the UK holding commemorative or educational events to memorialize the day in 2023, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT), a nonprofit established by the UK Government to promote and support International Holocaust Memorial Day.

However, since the Gaza war began with the Hamas terror onslaught of October 7, 2023, unleashing a wave of antisemitism around the world, observance in the educational system has been waning. Just under 1,200 held events in 2024, and only 854 schools did so in 2025, out of approximately 4,200 secondary schools across the country, HMDT said.

“I fear for what will happen this year,” UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote in an editorial published over the weekend in The Sunday Times.

Mirvis acknowledged the challenges educators face in organizing such an event in light of its “polarising impact,” with parents calling Holocaust education a form of propaganda or insisting it also highlight the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Many teachers facing this dilemma have opted to follow the path of least resistance: not to mark Holocaust Memorial Day at all,” he wrote.

However, a failure to teach about the Holocaust risks “corroding the moral foundations of a society,” he explained.

“The Shoah was not inevitable,” Mirvis wrote. “It was the end of a road paved with normalised scapegoating, constant disinformation, violent autocracy and a culture of the most extreme hatred. It began not in concentration camps but in classrooms, newspapers and public squares where people learnt to look away.”

“Holocaust education is therefore not Jewish self-interest. It is civic education in its most urgent form,” he continued. “It is not an endorsement of any government, perspective or conflict. It is an act of human memory.”

The European Jewish Congress voiced similar concerns, calling the data a “troubling signal.”

“Holocaust Memorial Day is not about politics. It is about memory, responsibility, and education,” the organization wrote in a statement. “It exists to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and to remind future generations of the consequences of hatred, indifference, and extremism. Avoiding commemoration out of fear of controversy undermines the very purpose of education.”

According to figures published by the Community Service Trust, a Jewish security charity, antisemitic incidents have been soaring in Britain since the war in Gaza began. Within days of Hamas’s attack, and even before Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, there were mass anti-Israeli protests in London. Rallies continued throughout the war, which halted in October 2025 with a US-brokered ceasefire.

More than 1,500 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the UK between January and June 2025, a figure that is second only to the first half of 2024, CST said in August.

Months of rising hate activity culminated in October with the Manchester Yom Kippur terror attack, when a driver plowed into pedestrians outside a synagogue before exiting his vehicle and attacking people with a knife. Two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed in the attack, Daulby by a gunshot fired by a police officer trying to take down the terrorist.