Board of Deputies President congratulates winning designers of United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition

Board of Deputies President Jonathan Arkush has congratulated Adjaye Associates, Ron Arad Architects and Gustafson Porter and Bowman on winning the design competition for the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition.

He said: “The design is at once sympathetic to its setting and also appropriately disruptive. Our hope is that the finished memorial will provide a fitting monument to the suffering of the victims of the Shoah.”

“We pay tribute to the distinguished judging panel which has painstakingly examined and scrutinised a large number of very high quality designs and performed the difficult task of selecting the deserving winner.

“We warmly welcome the commitment that the Government has shown to recognising the enormity of the Shoah and its lessons for humanity.  The memorial’s location at the heart of political life in our capital city underscores its significance and the particular responsibility of our politicians to stand up to hatred, particularly in these days of rising populism and extremism.

“A memorial on its own would be devoid of context and would fail to convey meaning.  We therefore strongly support combining the memorial with a learning centre so that the true facts of the cruelty and mass murder that characterised the Holocaust, and its lessons about the importance of opposing prejudice, can be effectively brought home to future generations.”