All Those We Love & See No Longer

Welcome to Cambridge’s interfaith civic event by Revd Cannon Adrian Daffern hosting us here at the University Church of Great St Mary’s. We will have a minute of silence together to remember all those we love and see no longer.

CANNON ADRIAN DAFFERN: Dear Deputy Lieutenant, Madam Deputy Mayor, members of Cambridge City Council, - our speakers Eva Clarke BEM, former childrens’ poet laureate Michael Rosen, Eric Murangwa MBE, MP Daniel Zeichner, Barry Griffiths & colleagues from Jimmys Homeless Shelter – and ALL those who have joined us especially the young people, singers, poets and school children who are participating today - a very warm welcome to Great St. Mary’s, the University Church. 

We are honoured to have been asked by the City of Cambridge to host this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day Civic Service as an interfaith occasion. For more than eight centuries, Great St Mary’s has stood in the heart of Cambridge, between the Market and the University: a place for Cambridge to come together to mourn, to celebrate, to learn, to remember. Whatever your faith and wherever you come from, be at home here in this place and know that you are welcome, as you are. 

Today we come together on this Holocaust Memorial Day, to remember the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust under Nazi Persecution, and in the genocides of more recent years. We will reflect on this year’s international theme, ‘Torn From Home’, through song, poetry and the personal stories of survivors of the Holocaust and in particular to mark the 25 years since the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. 

Finally, today is one of the first times we have gathered as a civic community since the unexpected tragic death of our Cambridge Mayor, Nigel Gawthrope, a friend to so many of us in Cambridge. We will be paying tribute to him at the end of the programme; we would like to begin today’s event with a minute of silence to remember Nigel.  Also for everyone gathered to take time to remember those missing from their lives, to think about all those whom we love but see no longer.