How many of the ten names above do you recognise?

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The 83 people who attended a Zoom meeting organised jointly by COFIS and Glasgow Friends of Israel on 22 March 2023 included many who knew them personally... spouses, parents, friends of ten innocent victims murdered by terrorists because they were thought to be Jewish (one of them was a Christian). Some of those who knew them are faced with life-changing injuries to themselves and/or loved ones: all have been cruelly robbed; emotionally scarred, and want to know that their loved ones' stories will not be forgotten.

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One parent of a murdered child spoke of his anger at the BBC's approach to reporting terrorist incidents in Israel. Two days after he buried his daughter, the then host of a Radio 4 programme called him, asking that he take part. When he indicated his willingness to do so, she then dropped the chilling bombshell that he would be joined on the show by the father of one of the terrorists. A hideous, life-changing experience for his entire family was to be reduced to entertainment, with an implied moral equivalence between victim and perpetrator. 

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The host, Jennie Milne, has written an immensely powerful book, which can be purchased in hard copy or as a PDF from the publisher here. Jennie's story herself is fascinating: raised Christian, her mother Elizabeth Lis having been abandoned as a baby in 1943; after her mother's death in 2014, Jennie decided to uncover as much as she could about her mother's family. It turned out that Elizabeth's parents had been a Polish lawyer, Stanislaw Lis, and his Jewish wife, Helena Rothenberg. Stanislaw was serving the Polish government-in-exile and remained in exile after the War: at the time Elizabeth was left at the Devon children's home, it may well have seemed that the safest thing for the baby was to know as little as possible about either parent's origins.

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The full talk is available on the GFI Youtube channel here. 

The Q&A session afterwards is available here.

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