Remembering for the Future

A series of international conferences with broad implications and enduring messages for humanity.

Dr Elisabeth Maxwell created a Holocaust education organisation called Remembering for the Future (RFTF), which she directed for twelve years, to establish the historical truth about the Holocaust through new research, but also to move forward, bringing the acquired expertise and research to bear on contemporary genocides with a view to finding ways to prevent these in the future. The idea for an international scholarly conference had taken shape in Dr Maxwell’s mind on her way to a visit with Elie Wiesel in 1986. Soon after that meeting, she met with American pioneers in the field of Christian-Jewish relations, Franklin Littell, Roy Eckardt, and Yehuda Bauer to further her idea. 

The first REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE conference took place in Oxford and London, UK, in July 1988. Almost 600 scholars from 24 countries were presented on Jews and Christians during the Holocaust and The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World and then published. Over 300 contributions, some totally outstanding and the large majority presenting valuable research, were presented in 23 workshops. To these papers were added the lectures given at the opening and close of the conference, both in Oxford and London, and they were then published in three volumes totalling 3200 pages, now recognised as a comprehensive publication of knowledge on the Holocaust at the time.

A smaller second REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE conference took place in Berlin in 1994. Entitled From Prejudice to Destruction – Western Civilisation in the Shadow of Auschwitz, it dealt with the philosophical and theological pre-conditions for the Holocaust, the complicity of intellectuals and business, and the then current issues surrounding the Holocaust.

A third conference, REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE 2000 was the largest academic conference of its kind: a 4-day event, attended by 650 delegates, in the first year of the new millennium, at a time when the world was celebrating human achievement in the Arts and Sciences. Dr Maxwell felt that it was RFTF 2000’s responsibility to communicate the legacy of the Holocaust for all humanity. The most authoritative papers have been published in a three-volume work, Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (May 2001). This work encompasses approximately three thousand fully indexed pages and constitutes the most comprehensive presentation of current Holocaust scholarship in any language.

How Elisabeth (Betty) Maxwell 'set precedence'

Three aspects impressed me most about my mother's spearheading RFTF:

1. She was a shy person who managed to find ways to publicly express her passion for the message; she set an admirable example of what it means to be an upstander.

2. She leveraged her approachable personality to open doors that invited everyone to the table and meaningfully engaged them in the discussion: politicians, survivors, educators, reporters, academics, religious leaders, scholars, and laymen - from around the world.

3. She was self-educated from a non-Jewish perspective which allowed her to more fully appreciate the complex issues and feelings of complicity that led to an expanded awareness beyond the usual.

It is essential to remember that before the 1988 RFTF conference, the Holocaust was hardly mentioned in the newspapers or media, and that at that time, the internet was not yet a public phenomena. The Holocaust was not part of the UK school curriculum and was only taught in a very few private Jewish-sponsored institutions. Yet now, the UK has been commemorating the Holocaust annually since 2001 and the Permanent Exhibition on the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum has been visited by millions of visitors since it was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in July 2001. Before that, of course, Beth Shalom offered the only Holocaust exhibition and memorial centre in this country!