'Holocaust' mayor attacks BNP from synagogue pulpit

The East End's outspoken woman mayor took the unprecedented step of making a political plea at Sunday's interfaith Holocaust Memorial service to blast the British National Party.

Cllr Anne Jackson urged East London's Jewish, Anglican, Muslim, Hindu, Bhudist and Bahai leaders to mobilise their communities for May's London elections.

They had to get to the polls to reduce the right-wing extremists' percentage and prevent them getting a foothold at City Hall, she warned.

"This is not a political arena, but I have to bring up politics," she told them.

"We have to be vigilant with the London elections coming up. Proportional representation on the Greater London Authority may mean we end up with the BNP getting some seats. They only need five per cent. Then they would be part of London's ruling body. Imagine how awful that would be for us and the world."

The Tower Hamlets Mayor, whose civic role bars her from party politics, defied protocol at the synagogue pulpit on Sunday when she urged the different faith leaders: "Make your communities aware they musty vote for their preferred candidate to lower the BNP percentage and make it hard for them to gain seats. People are still out there spreading the same poison that caused the Nazi holocaust 60 years ago.

But Sunday's memorial was more about remembering the six million Jews and a million others who perished in the Nazi death camps in between 1939 and 45.

The community leaders at Sunday's service at East London Central synagogue sat silently as Holocaust survivor Henry Glaze, now 83 and living in retirement in the East End, gave his story.

Henry was, at 15, undoubtedly one of the very last Jewish youngsters to get out of Hitler's Reich, on the day Germany invaded Poland which triggered the Second World War. The invasion began just five hours after he crossed the frontier into neutral Denmark on September 1, 1939, after being sent on the Kindertransporte scheme to get Jewish children out.

"It was very tense that day I got out when the fighting began," Henry remembers. "But my brother and parents were trapped in Kiel and ended up in the camps. I never saw them again. My father died at Auschwitz, my mother at Belsec."

Britain took in 40,000 Jews escaping Hitler's persecution by the outbreak of war.

Of special importance to Henry was the British Government's decision to admit 10,000 youngsters under 18 sponsored by Jewish organisations. Henry Glaze was one of them. He ended up in East London where he has lived in freedom from fear for the past 60 years.

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