Also laying a wreath was Board of Deputies CEO Phil Rosenberg, who shared a personal anecdote. “My own grandfather, Jack Rosenberg, served on a hospital ship in the Second World War. In one memorable incident, he donated blood for a transfusion for a captured and injured Nazi officer.
“It must have been quite something for the Nazi officer who had been taught of the impurity of Jewish blood to realise that the blood that had save him, now coursing through his own veins, was that same Jewish blood.”
Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis led the prayers (Image: Justin Grainge)[Missing Credit]
“To me, in that act of duty… that charity and compassion… it was a moral victory.”
Reviewing Officer Brigadier Melissa Emmett MBE was another to speak. She said that the Jewish community has a particularly strong sense of collective memory, possibly due to the fact that it is a people which has had to move from place to place over the generations, taking their histories with them.
“These are things we can keep with us wherever we go,” she said. “Nobody can take them from us or destroy them. If memories can’t be killed, I think that makes them immortal.” For that reason, she said, remembrance “is our duty”.
Just after midday the crowd began to grow around the Cenotaph on Whitehall, waiting for the parade to come. By 2pm, a huge proportion of the street was alive with eager, but patiently waiting attendees, including friends of the Jewish community – and a small white dog which received a special commendation from the announcer for being “so well behaved”.
Then, the sound of trumpets could be heard as the parade turned onto Whitehall and as the servicemen and women marched past us, that very communal sense of remembrance that Emmett had just spoken of was palpable.
However, it wasn’t only the war against the Nazis that was on some of the speakers’ minds, but the war that broke out just over two years ago on October 7 and the record-breaking levels of antisemitism since then on UK soil.
Community Security Trust (CST) chief executive Mark Gardner MBE said: “Previous wars [in Israel] had come and gone in a matter of weeks, and each war had brought a surge of antisemitism as the lid blew off the pressure cooker, and then a few weeks later, the lid would kind of go back on again.”
After two years, however, there is a “sense that antisemitism is something that is harder and harder to escape from” and it has “permeated most parts of our Jewish community”.
This rising Jew-hatred came to its terrible peak last month on Yom Kippur, when worshippers at Heaton Park Synagogue were brutally attacked by terrorist Jihad Al Shamie.
AJEX chair Dan Fox said that the worshippers who had barricaded the doors to prevent Al Shamie from entering had “demonstrated the sort of courage and resilience known anywhere in the Army, Navy and Air Force”.
Wreaths were laid for the Jews who served in the wars (Image: Justin Grainge)[Missing Credit]
Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, who was back in Whitehall after representing the Jewish community on Remembrance Sunday just one week earlier, also paid homage to the victims of Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue attack. Commending those who had defended the synagogue, he said: “Within an instant, without any textbook to follow, dozens of people who had come to shul just to daven immediately knew what they had to do.
“They were there not for themselves, but to protect and guarantee the lives of others, and that is what they did [by] barricading the entrance to the shul. That’s the flavour of our Jewish life.”
Speaking of the parade, he said: “Within my exceptionally busy diary, there is one event every year that stands out as my favourite – and that is the AJEX parade.
“On this day we stand tall with enormous pride, bearing in mind the extraordinary contribution that we as a community have given to our country, and, at the same time, British society recognises that contribution by enabling us to stage this event.”
Other wreath-layers included Holocaust survivors and veterans, as well as celebrity barrister Rob Rinder MBE.
AJEX Chief Executive Fiona Palmer said: “In a world where the rise in antisemitism is challenging our values and communities, this parade is our answer: a public and proud declaration of who we are, where we come from, and what we stand for.”
As the remembrance service came to an end, the National Anthem was sung, and Big Ben chimed three times – a powerful finale to a moving afternoon.
As the CST’s Gardner said earlier, the AJEX remembrance day is an expression of “our Britishness and our Jewishness”.
“We don’t need to compromise on either aspect of our identity because they run together and they interweave. Today, we show our historical, our current, our future – and our physical resilience, by marching proudly as Jewish people, by marching proudly as British people.”