This coming Tuesday I'll be in Belfast for Holocaust Memorial Day. This year we'll remember not just the destruction of two thirds of European Jewry, but also the devastating tragedy in Rwanda when in the spring of 1994 a brutal conflict claimed the lives of over 800,000 people in the space of a hundred days.

I remember when Holocaust Memorial Day was first announced, on January 27 2000. I was in Stockholm, where a gathering of more than 20 European heads of state committed themselves to a continuing programme of education in the evils of genocide. At the time, people asked, why do we need to remember? Surely all that was in the past. Since then we've had 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, repeated acts of terror throughout the world - and who knows what else lies in store in this tense and troubled age.

There is only one cure for the virus of hate, namely education. Two years ago for Holocaust Memorial Day I went to a school in south London. The pupils came from 43 different language groups - almost every religion and ethnicity you could imagine -- and together we listened to two pupils, one a Muslim, the other from Africa, speaking about a visit they'd made to Auschwitz, and how it had changed their lives.

Everyone sat in total silence. And when the assembly was over and people were filing out, some of the eleven year olds in the front row called me over and said, "Sir, we want you to know that if anyone picks on someone in this school, we're there to protect them. We don't allow any racism here." And I thought: if only such moments could be replicated around the world, how much grief we might spare, how many lives we might save, in the years to come.

And then I remembered one of the most moving sentences in the Bible, when Moses just before his death turns to the children of the next generation and says: "Don't hate an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land." Don't hate the people who persecuted their parents and made their lives hell? How could he say such a thing? But the truth is: he knew that to build a society of freedom, you have to let go of hate. Without that, he might have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but he would have failed to take Egypt out of the Israelites. That's what Moses taught the children of his time, and it's what we must teach the children of ours.

© Copyright Office of the Chief Rabbi 2001 - all rights reserved. Reproduction of this Web site, in whole or in part, in any form or medium without express written permission from the Office of the Chief Rabbi is prohibited.