‘Deeply troubling’: London officials hide Holocaust memorial from anti-Israel mob

Hyde Park officials feared the cenotaph would be vandalized by protestors during their Saturday march against Israel.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Yad Vashem slammed the covering of a London Holocaust memorial Saturday by officials fearful of it being vandalized by anti-Israel protestors.

“The decision to cover up Holocaust memorials and exhibitions out of fear from the scourge of global antisemitism is deeply troubling,” the World Holocaust Remembrance Center said in a statement.

“By concealing these historical reminders, we are only addressing the symptoms while ignoring the root cause of the issue.”

“Yad Vashem implores authorities to address the heart of the events: hatred and antisemitism,” the statement continued. “These are the true issues that are eating away at the moral fabric of our society.”

The boulder, which was covered with blue tarpaulin and guarded by police officers, lies on a gravel bed surrounded by a copse of silver birch trees in Hyde Park.

There has been a Saturday march though the center of London almost every week since Hamas sparked a war with Israel after it invaded Gazan envelope communities October 7, slaughtering 1,200 people, including the elderly and infants.

The participants, in their thousands, often scream genocidal chants against Jews as they walk and the demonstrations sometimes descend into violence. The marches end with speeches made in Hyde Park, which is a renowned protest site in the UK.

The local police force has been fiercely criticized for standing by instead of arresting those who violate public order and preferring to stop visibly Jewish people from walking near the demonstrators so as not to “provoke” them.

On Friday, the Campaign Against Antisemitism group canceled a planned “Walk Together” counter-demonstration to show that Jews could walk freely in the city, saying that it had received “numerous threats” and was afraid for the participants’ safety.

The fact that the boulder was covered, said the Royal Parks authorities, as a “precautionary measure,” outraged the Board of Jewish Deputies, which commissioned the memorials in 1983, as well as Lord Eric Pickles, UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues.

“Have we become so cowed and fearful in this country that instead of expecting pro-Palestinian protesters to obey the law, we hide away the memorial to save it from vandalism?” Pickles asked.

Holocaust survivor Noemi Ebenstein, 82, told the Daily Mail that seeing the memorial covered this way was “shameful.”

“Those who are Jew haters, those who are Holocaust deniers, they are winning because we are afraid of them,” she continued. “I just wish the Western world would stand up to these people, instead of running away, covering up monuments and being apologetic.”

The cenotaph was the country’s first public memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II. It is inscribed in both English and Hebrew with a verse from the Book of Lamentations, “For these I weep. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because of the destruction of my people.”

Holocaust remembrance ceremonies take place there annually.

anti-Israel protestsAntisemitismHolocaust memorialLondonLondon police