80 years since the Holocaust
Over 1000 people are expected to attend the event hosted by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
Dr Helen Lewis will be the keynote speaker at this year’s communal Yom Hashoah commemoration taking place on Sunday, April 27, which will mark 80 years since liberation and the end of the Holocaust.
Over 1000 people are expected to attend the event hosted by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, including Holocaust survivors, NSW Governor Margaret Beazley, politicians, consuls-general of various countries, Jewish communal leaders and leaders of other ethnic and faith communities.
Lewis’s father, Sgt. Mike Lewis, was a British army combat cameraman who filmed the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. He took some of the first images of the Nazis’ crimes that shocked the world and his footage was the first ever use of film as corroboratory evidence in a war crimes trial. Lewis wrote her PhD thesis on her father’s experiences as a combat cameraman and wrote the book The Dead Still Cry Out: The Story of a Combat Cameraman. She has presented internationally on the ethics and aesthetics of disseminating images of atrocity.
Mike Lewis’s footage from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, alongside an archival interview, was shown on SBS earlier this week in the haunting Sam Mendes-directed documentary What They Found.
Also during the commemoration event, six Holocaust survivors – Ana Deleon, Gaby Deleon, Dasia Black, Jack Meister, Lucy Chladek and Paul Drexler – will share their liberation stories on video, before each lights a memorial candle on stage.
JBD Shoah Remembrance Committee chair Dane Stern said: “This year’s commemoration, marking 80 years since liberation, promises to be extremely moving. We will have the rare opportunity to hear the stories of liberated survivors as well as their liberators.”
In this year’s Righteous Among the Nations segment, Bill Marynissen will speak about his Dutch grandparents, who last year were posthumously honoured as Righteous for risking their lives to save a Jewish boy.
On the morning of April 27, the annual Memorial Service and Reading of Names will be held at the Martyrs’ Memorial, Rookwood Cemetery. The keynote speaker will be Professor Ruth Balint on the migration experience of Holocaust survivors to Australia following liberation. Attendees will have the opportunity to publicly read the names of their relatives who perished in the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, Youth HEAR will hold their Yom Hashoah commemoration on April 28.
Free tickets to the commemorations can be booked at www.nswjbd.org.au/yomhashoah2025 and at www.youthhear.org.au
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