British schools are erasing the Holocaust.

Since October 7, 2023, the number of British schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has collapsed. A society that cannot remember its darkest crime has already decided its future.

photo: Eelco Böhtlingk/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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On January 27th, Britain is meant to pause. Not to debate contemporary politics, to posture, or to litigate the Middle East, but to remember.

To remember what happens when a society decides that a minority is less than human and when institutions charged with shaping young minds choose silence, equivocation, or fear over truth.

Yet, since October 7, 2023, the day that an Islamist genocidal death cult, murdered, raped and tortured over 1,200 innocent men, women, and children solely for the crime of being Jewish, something deeply disturbing has happened in this country: The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has collapsed.

In 2023, more than 2,000 secondary schools across the UK registered to commemorate the day, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Participation had risen every year since 2019. In 2024, that number fell to fewer than 1,200. In 2025, it dropped again, to just 854, a reduction of nearly 60 per cent from before the Hamas-led massacre. This is not coincidence, and it is not administrative drift. It is fear and hate, both complicit and explicit.

Teachers and charities report schools stepping back because of “backlash from parents” — backlash against educating children about the greatest state-sponsored, industrial crime against humanity ever perpetrated. Backlash against teaching that six million Jewish men, women, children, and babies were systematically exterminated. Backlash against memory itself.

Are we meant to accept this as a reasonable concern?

The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, warned precisely where this leads: “Holocaust Memorial Day is not a platform for political debate. It is not an endorsement of any government, perspective, or conflict. It is an act of human memory.” And then the line that should haunt every parent and policymaker in the country: “If we cannot teach our children to remember the past with integrity and resolve, then we must ask ourselves what kind of future they will inherit.”

This collapse of remembrance is not happening in isolation. It is part of a much wider and far more dangerous phenomenon of strategic inversion. Just as the Holocaust is being quietly sidelined, diminished, treated as “too controversial,” October 7th has been subjected to the same moral contortions in real time: rape denial, claims the massacre was exaggerated or staged, and conspiracy theories about the Hannibal Directive (the grotesque assertion that Jews fabricated their own slaughter) — the inversion that labels Jewish self-defence as “genocide,” while erasing the worst massacre of Jews since 1945, a day when more Jews were murdered than on any day since the Nazis were defeated.

The pattern is identical: If you cannot deny the crime outright, blur it, contextualise it, relativise it, and exhaust empathy until it disappears.

What is new and what should terrify us is how deeply this inversion has now embedded itself inside our education system. Because fear alone does not explain this retreat from Holocaust remembrance; institutional capture does.

Britain’s largest teaching union, the National Education Union, has over recent years become something profoundly different from what its Jewish members believed it to be. According to detailed reporting, Jewish teachers have described an environment where hostility to Israel, and increasingly to Jewish identity itself, is not challenged but normalised. Where discussing Jewish history or Zionism is treated as provocation, but inflammatory claims of “genocide” are aired freely in staffrooms and classrooms alike.

Union resources have repeatedly aligned themselves with explicitly political campaigning, while Jewish teachers raising concerns report being dismissed, marginalised, or told (implicitly and explicitly) that their discomfort is the price of “solidarity.”

The case of Bristol Brunel Academy crystallised this reality: A visit by Jewish Labour Member of Parliament Damien Egan, invited to speak at his former school, was cancelled following pressure from pro-Palestinian activists. That pressure was reportedly supported by local National Education Union members. This was not about safeguarding pupils; it was about policing Jewish presence.

At the National Education Union’s own conference, a 76-year-old Jewish retired teacher was booed off stage for challenging a motion that blamed Israel for the war in Gaza. The message could not have been clearer: Jewish voices would be tolerated only if they complied. “Good” Jews would be accepted and to be a “good” Jew one simply had to disavow the State of Israel, Jewish self-determination, and 3,000 years of history, heritage, and legacy.

And at the top of the union sits Daniel Kebede, who previously urged crowds at a rally to “globalise the intifada,” language that calls for the exportation of violence against Jews across the Western world, including the massacre that took place at Bondi Beach in Australia last month, as well as the attack on Yom Kippur at a Manchester synagogue last October — giving Daniel Kebede, based on his own words, exactly what he hoped for.

This is not accidental drift; it is ideological capture.

Since the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s Jewish community has been warning that antisemitism within Left-wing educational institutions was becoming normalised, excused, and then quietly embedded. Those warnings were dismissed as exaggeration, bad faith, or an attempt to “silence criticism.” Only now, after the memory of the Holocaust itself is being pushed out of classrooms, do we see calls for enquiries.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is finally calling for scrutiny, but to what end? Why did it take years of Jewish parents, teachers, and leaders shouting into the void before anyone paid attention? And why are some now thanking political leaders for finally acting, as though waiting until the cancer has spread to the organs is something to applaud?

This moment should not reassure us; it should confirm what many already know. We are fighting on multiple fronts, and we are losing. The media is the primary frontline in this war, because it amplifies propaganda to millions, whether through institutions like the BBC or through social media ecosystems flooded with Qatari-funded narratives, paid activists, and useful idiots.

But the collapse of Holocaust remembrance forces a harder truth into view: If the memory of the Holocaust itself can be intimidated out of schools, then we are not just losing arguments, we are losing the next generation, making education just as vital a battlefield — which, in and of itself, leads to an unavoidable conclusion, that we must focus our bandwidth on our own.

That means educating our own children, grounding them in history, teaching them to recognise inversion, to spot lies, to understand what happens when hatred is normalised and memory erased. That means continuing to call out racism wherever we see it, not because we expect immediate redemption, but because our children must see that Jews are unafraid, unashamed, proud, and loud.

A society that cannot remember its darkest crime has already decided its future.

Jews have always been the canary in the coal mine. We are the early warning, ignored until the air becomes unbreathable for everyone else. For years we warned where this was heading. We were told to be patient, to trust institutions, to lower our voices, to wait our turn.

That time is over.

We owe nothing to systems and institutions that have failed us. Our duty is no longer to rescue a society that refuses to save itself. Our responsibility is no longer outward; it is inward, to our children and to the generations that follow.

We must teach them what others will not, cannot, and refuse to teach to their own. We must preserve memory where institutions have surrendered it and we must raise Jews who understand that pride, truth, and courage are not optional.

Society is already failing this test, but we must not fail our own.

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