The Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre, the National Holocaust Museum and Centre, was the first dedicated Holocaust memorial museum in Britain. It is located at Laxton, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, on a 30-acre site that includes the museum building, gardens of remembrance, and the Aegis Trust offices. It was founded in 1995 by James and Stephen Smith, the brothers whose family had purchased the Laxton property; it has been continuously open since and has provided Holocaust education to around three quarters of a million British schoolchildren, the largest single contribution to British Holocaust education by any institution.
The founding
The brothers James and Stephen Smith were Christian theology students who had visited Yad Vashem in 1991 and had returned to Britain convinced that the country lacked an institutional response to the Holocaust on the scale that Israel, Germany, the United States and Poland had built. The British position in 1991 was that the Holocaust was treated within the Imperial War Museum’s wider Second World War galleries and within the Wiener Library’s archive, but that no dedicated educational institution existed for the school visits and public programmes that were standard in the other countries. The brothers persuaded their family to make the Laxton property available, raised the initial funding from private donors, and opened Beth Shalom (Hebrew: house of peace) on 21 September 1995, fifty years after the liberation.
The institution operated initially with a small staff and a single permanent exhibition. The first year’s visitor numbers were around 8,000; by the early 2000s, with the establishment of the school programmes, they had risen to over 25,000 a year, of which around 80 per cent were school groups. The expansion to the current scale dates from the 2017 redevelopment, which added a new exhibition building and the Forever Project (a digital interactive testimony installation that allows visitors to ask questions of recorded survivor responses).
The exhibition and the testimony
The permanent exhibition is structured around the experience of British survivors who settled in the United Kingdom after the war and who agreed, from the late 1990s onwards, to give their testimony to the centre. The institution has gathered testimony from over 200 British-resident survivors, several of whom have spoken regularly to school groups and were the principal voices of the centre’s educational programme until their deaths in the 2010s and 2020s. The Forever Project, completed in 2016 in association with the USC Shoah Foundation, allows visitors to ask spoken questions of digital recordings of seven of these survivors and to receive recorded responses; the project is the principal British application of the testimony-preservation work that the loss of the survivor generation has made urgent.
The grounds of the centre include the Memorial Gardens, the Memorial Stone, and a series of memorial sculptures including a goods wagon installed in 2008 as a representation of the deportation transports. The setting is rural and quiet; the contrast with the urban institutional settings of Yad Vashem, USHMM and the Wiener Library is deliberate.
The school programme and the wider work
The school programme is the centre’s central work and the source of its national reputation. Around 25,000 school students visit each year, principally from English secondary schools, on day-long programmes that include the exhibition, a survivor talk (now mostly delivered through the Forever Project), and structured discussion sessions. The programme is integrated with the British secondary school curriculum and has worked closely with the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education on the curriculum design.
The associated Aegis Trust, founded by the same brothers in 2000, works on genocide prevention more broadly; it has been responsible for the establishment of the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda (opened 2004) and for genocide-prevention educational work in several African countries. The Trust’s work is connected to but distinct from the Beth Shalom Centre’s, and the two share offices at the Laxton site.
The standing of the institution
Beth Shalom is the principal British dedicated Holocaust museum and is widely cited in the British Holocaust education literature as the institutional pioneer. Its work since 1995 has substantially shaped what British secondary school pupils know about the Holocaust and how they encounter the subject. The institution has continued to operate independently of any state funding, supported by its admissions revenue, by private donations and by grants for specific projects. The centre’s existence has not, however, removed the wider question of whether Britain needs a national Holocaust memorial in London; the Westminster proposal addressed elsewhere on this site is the long-running parliamentary discussion of that question.
See also
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- The Wiener Holocaust Library London
- Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Sources
- James M. Smith, Beth Shalom: A Holocaust Memorial Centre, Beth Shalom Limited, 1997
- Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, Routledge, 2014
- Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, Manchester University Press, 2010 (chapters on British Holocaust memorialisation)
- Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, Yale University Press, 2015
- National Holocaust Centre and Museum, “The Forever Project” documentation, https://www.nationalholocaustcentre.net
- UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, research on Holocaust knowledge in British secondary schools, https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk
- Aegis Trust, https://www.aegistrust.org