HMDT blog: five ways to mark HMD at your museum, gallery or heritage site
Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) offers museums, galleries and heritage sites the opportunity to bring their communities together to reflect on lessons from the past and remember the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and millions more people murdered through the Nazi persecution of other groups and in the more recent genocides recognised by the UK government. We also mark the genocide in Darfur.
HMD enables sites to educate and inspire visitors about the importance of fighting discrimination, racism, and prejudice. It is a time to bring the community together and engage visitors with collections and exhibits which highlight stories of resilience, loss, and the fight for human rights.
There are many different ways you could mark HMD at your site, but here are some ideas:
- Make an HMD display or exhibition, using resources such as our HMD posters which are free to download. You could:
a. Showcase the culture of one of the groups persecuted under the different genocides. You could make links with local organisations from the Jewish, Roma, LGBT, disabled, Cambodian, Rwandan, Bosnian, Darfuri or Yazidi communities.
The Natural History Natural History Museum lit up for HMD © Justin Grainge
b. Link the stories of refugees in your local community and the memories of their arrival in the UK with the stories of those who rebuilt their lives after the Holocaust and more recent genocides. - Take part in our Light the Darkness national moment by lighting up your site in purple or lighting a memorial candle at 8pm on 27 January. You can order commemorative HMD candles, as well as stickers and pin badges, here.
- Run an art, poetry or historical workshop, using artefacts from your collections relating to memories such as photographs, diaries, letters and household artefacts, for inspiration. For example, participants could reflect on this Emmanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat Archive resource and then create their own time capsules, by considering how they would like to be remembered.
- Take a digital action, by posting about HMD on your social media. You can find template posts, hashtags, downloadable graphics and more here.
- Display a digital exhibition or film on a screen for visitors to stop by and watch. We provide a large range of digital exhibitions which you can play muted as well as films of survivor testimonies and more.
If you are marking HMD, please also consider holding a fundraiser to support our work as part of your activities. This could be as simple as including a collection, or you could hold a bigger fundraising event. Your donation will help to bring people together from different backgrounds to learn about the past and take action for a better future.
To discuss marking HMD at your museum, gallery or heritage site, including how you could tailor it to your collections, please do reach out to [email protected].
Finally, as ever, make sure you add your activity to our interactive map to become part of the big picture of how the UK marks HMD 2025.
Image: The Friends of Down County Museum created a wall hanging of a menorah for HMD.
