| | | Praise Service Sunday 27 January 2013 |
Report and photos Jim Paterson
The
Praise musicians from Left to Right: Joan Cape (vocals), Ricky Barr (guitar), Caroline Toms (guitar and vocals), Neil
Cape (bass guitar), Sam McDonald (drums), and Graham
McDonald (piano).
Sunday January 27th was the Holocaust Memorial Day, a national event in the United
Kingdom dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of The Holocaust. First held in
January 2001 it has been on the same date every year since. The chosen date is the
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Union in
1945, the date also chosen for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and
some
other national Holocaust Memorial Days. The Praise Service took the
theme of ‘Genocide’ which is defined as “the
deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an
ethnic, racial, religious, or national group”.
The
service opened with ‘ Father God I Wonder’, followed by El
Shaddai’, and ‘Lord I Lift Your Name on High’. Joan
and Neil Cape then described that the term Genocide
was attributed
to Raphael Lemkin a Polish Jew, who spent his life crusading for the
world to stand up against these horrible atrocities. As a young lawyer
Lemkin knew that if it had happened before, it could happen again. He
drafted a proposal for international
laws to be created against the crime he described as the targeted destruction of ethnic,
national and religious groups. He submitted the proposal to an international law
conference in Madrid in 1933. While Lemkin understood a nation’s right to sovereignty,
he once pointed out that “sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of
innocent people.”
Although turned down he persevered, being inspired by Churchill’s statement during the
second world war, hat we are in “the presence of a crime without a name.” Finally, in
1948, the United Nations adopted a human rights treaty for the first time, the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Joan showed a slide which displayed the magnitude of Genocide in recent times,
namely 1,000,000 – 1,500,000 Armenians in the first world war, 3,000,000 Ukrainians
(at least), 6,000,000 Jews, 2,000,000 Cambodians, 30,000 Bosnian Muslims killed,
2,500,000 driven out, 500,000 – 1,000,000 Tutsi
We continued with ‘Filled with Compassion’, ‘Faithful God’, ‘Faithful One, so
unchanging’,’I will Speak Out’. A time of reflection was provided and the thoughts and
prayers were hung on the cross. We finished with ‘In Christ Alone’
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