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Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council’s Holocaust Memorial programme will include a remembrance service at Monkstown Jubilee Centre, on January 22, councillors have agreed.

The commemoration will conclude with a civic ceremony at the borough’s Holocaust Memorial where wreaths are expected to be laid.

A permanent memorial was created for Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough and placed within the Northern Ireland Centenary Garden, Monkstown Jubilee Centre, in 2021.

The service in Newtownabbey next month will include a presentation from Oliver Sears, founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland, on ‘Second Generation Reflection: The Objects of Love.’

An evening of remembrance was held in January of this year at the Holocaust Memorial, Monkstown.

Holocaust Memorial Day is held internationally annually on January 27 to remember the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

After the Holocaust, the international community adopted a legal definition of the crime of “genocide”.

Holocaust Memorial Day also remembers those who were murdered or affected by the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

The organisers of Holocaust Memorial Day say that subsequent genocides “represent a failure of humanity to learn from the Holocaust and are a reminder for all of us that we must be prepared to guard against genocide happening again in the future”.

This year’s theme is ‘Ordinary People’. The theme “highlights the ordinary people who let genocide happen, the ordinary people who actively perpetrated genocide, and the ordinary people who were persecuted”.

The theme is also expected to “prompt consideration of how ordinary people can perhaps play a bigger part in challenging prejudice today”.

Michelle Weir, Local Democracy Reporter

Civic Holocaust service to be held at Monkstown memorial