A new Holocaust Heritage Centre is coming to Huddersfield.

The University of Huddersfield has been awarded more than £0.5m Lottery funding to create the Holocaust Heritage and Learning Centre for the North.

The Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £520,000 will enable the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association to create the centre at the University’s Heritage Quay

It will mean the University will become a major regional centre for study of the Holocaust, enabling huge numbers of teachers, schoolchildren, students, community groups, academics and individuals to learn more about the atrocity via photographs, digital testimonies, records of persecution, family letters and artefacts.

The university is already the setting for an annual Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture – which has been delivered by survivors who found refuge in the north of England – and now it will deploy advanced technology to ensure the legacy of survivors will be preserved for future generations.

It is intended the Holocaust Heritage and Learning Centre for the North – still in the planning stages – will enable pupil, student and community workshops, teacher education, films, research and discussion and provide space for special exhibitions.

Artist's impression of the Holocaust heritage Centre

An HSFA spokesman said: “The project seeks to promote universal values of human rights and individual responsibility in fighting racism and xenophobia in all its forms in today’s world.”

Closely involved in the collaboration with the HSFA is the university’s Prof Tim Thornton, who is Pro Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Learning. A historian himself, he said that he was deeply committed to the project and that Huddersfield’s central location and the facilities at Heritage Quay made the university an ideal partner.

He said: “We will be able to give a whole range of people – including schoolchildren – more immediate access and a better engagement with the survivor heritage than they have at the moment.

“There is a commitment across the political spectrum to ensure that the witness represented by the survivors will go on. Unfortunately there are people who try to deny it or choose to ignore it, so it is very important that we continue to engage with the evidence.”

Prof Thornton added that the Holocaust Heritage and Learning Centre for the North would be a perfect fit with the traditions of the university and the principles behind Heritage Quay.

“We use archival materials to take a really serious issue and engage with a very wide public and do so in an energetic and exciting way, but one which is thoroughly scholarly at the same time,” he said.

Holocaust support group chairman Lilian Black
Holocaust support group chairman Lilian Black

Lilian Black, who chairs the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association, said: “We are thrilled at this vote of confidence in our work here in the North of England. The centre is an exciting investment in all of our futures and reflects the values of Britain.

“It is so important that we learn the lessons of the Holocaust to ensure our past fate does not become our future again. Over recent years we have been able to collect digital testimony, gather thousands of photographs and access survivors’ records of Nazi persecution through the International Tracing Service in Germany. We have built strong partnerships in the UK and internationally which can now be brought together in a wonderful community resource at Heritage Quay within the University of Huddersfield, all thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund.”