From 2-3pm 25th January 2026 Community Solidarity Stroud District held our annual Holocaust Memorial Day event at Lansdown Hall. Here we reproduce the programme, videos of speeches (and text of these where possible).
Programme
The international theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is ‘Bridging the Generations’
Arrival music by The Stroud Red Band
Welcome by Adam Horovitz, poet and member of Community Solidarity Stroud District. Adam is presenting today’s Holocaust Memorial Day event.
Jeremy Green from Stroud Red Band and Community Solidarity Stroud District will introduce, Zog Nicht Keyn Mol, the first piece of music for Stroud HMD Event.
Speakers
- Julia Wilton, Stroud Trades Council
- Denise Needleman, Community Solidarity Stroud District
- Baron Mendes da Costa, Three Counties Liberal Jewish Community will say Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer
- Rev James Turk, representing Churches Together in Stroud
- Mustafa Davies, Stroud Muslim Prayer Hall
- Shelley Rider, Three Counties Liberal Jewish Community – poem about Anne Frank
- Mohammed Elsharif, Sudanese Community Activist
Music – The Stroud Red Band – ‘Einheitsfrontlied’ (United Front Song)
Speakers
- Simon Opher- Member of Parliament
- Charlotte Levene, Na’amod Gloucestershire
- Alice Jolly, local author of ’The Matchbox Girl’
- Sue Oppenheimer, Stroud Together with Refugees
- Freddie Janke, Stroud Against Racism
- Teddy, Radical Youth Space for Education (RYSE)
Adam Horovitz – close
The Red Band will play ‘The Internationale’.
Videos
Livestream recording of event
This video is the recording of a livestream made from Community Solidarity Stroud District’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day event, held in 2026 on Sunday 25th January. Sadly the opening of the event is missing from the recording due to technical difficulties, but this video features the speakers from Denise Needleman onwards.
Video of speech by Alice Jolly – local author of ’The Matchbox Girl’
Text of speech by Teddy from The RYSE
Hello. I’m here on behalf of the RYSE
Thank you for inviting me.
Being here with you all today, I know that whatever I could say about the tragedy of the holocaust could only be achingly inadequate.
There is nothing I can say to recognise the depth and width of the tragedy, or understand the way it feels to live with the ongoing pain that is its legacy.
There are so many and so much that was lost
And as a young person of today, trying to figure out how to orient to a world still so full of such genocide and destruction, I look back
And I find so much strength in the few stories I know
Of those like Sophie Scholl who was executed at 21 for organising youth against nazism
Some of her last words are said to have been
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. … It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt”
We hear in this, the power of youth. It is so often youth who are the first and fiercest to give their bodies to stand up against injustice.
And we youth need the olders.
For us to live “never forget” and “never again” we need intergenerational relationships.
We need the olders to remember, to tell stories, to share the past and its wisdom with us, to support us, and to hold us to account when we are shortsighted.
And the olders need us youngers, to shape the future with our energy, to act with the indignation and idealism, courage and hope, that so often comes with the youth.
The stories of the holocaust are full of such brave people
of those who’s courage burned brighter than their fear, who’s love and conviction called them to do things for the greater good no matter the personal expense, and in them I find the guidance I need to be what the world needs of me today, or at least to try
These ancestors teach us what “never again” really means
Because it is not just a slogan
The holocaust was a tragedy that bears no comparison, and yet, it was not the first or last pogrom
It wasn’t an isolated incident that came out of nowhere, and the conditions that created it did not vanish
They say fascism is the face that colonialism wears at home.
We cannot separate fascism from empirealism
And empirealism has got it’s claws round all our throats in a choke hold
As long as imperialism continues, we will continue to see genocides across the world, until capitalist imperialism eats itself and kills us all by destroying the earth.
We don’t just say never forget and never again, we live those things as tenets that direct our actions, every day.
We keep reminding eachother, keep holding eachother responsible for creating peace and justice on this earth.
We show up to oppose the racist protests happening outside asylum seeker hotels in Gloucester and Cheltenham.
We fight for the rights of our neighbours, and don’t let anyone be made into the scapegoat for the crimes of the rich.
We do all we can to figure out together, how we are going to take apart all empire all over the earth, and build a world together that all our children would be proud of.
We talk about ancestors of blood, but we also have ancestors of struggle, of our common cause. May we all join together as future ancestors in this lineage
In the names of our brave and precious ancestors, may they rest in glory, and we find our strength in them.
Thank you
Who are we:
Community Solidarity Stroud District exists to build community led solidarity in the Stroud district to oppose the hatred of minorities and oppressed people arising from false and harmful information.
Community Solidarity Stroud District 