Dora Love continues to inspire

More Essex and Suffolk school pupils than ever before will be participating in this year’s Dora Love Prize. They will be developing projects aimed at standing up to and combatting discrimination and intolerance based on an awareness of what happened during the Nazi period in Germany and Nazi occupied Europe.

Dora Love was a Holocaust survivor who in the last 40 years of her life lived and worked in Colchester. She worked tirelessly to teach younger generations that the attitudes which made the Holocaust possible – intolerance, discrimination and hatred of those regarded as ‘different’ – are still alive all around us. 

The Dora Love Prize is open to students in Years 7 to 10 at schools in Essex and Suffolk and is awarded for the project that best expresses Dora’s main principles: speaking up against hatred, never forgetting the consequences of seemingly small acts of discrimination and developing a sense of personal responsibility.

Prize founder and organiser, Emeritus Professor Rainer Schulze said: “At a time when nationalistic and populist groups are on the rise again and feel they can spread their messages of hate and racism with impunity, when people are being marginalised because of their origin, the colour of their skin or their religious beliefs, when facts are derided as ‘fake news’, the Dora Love Prize is more important than ever to give young people a firm understanding that similar developments in the past have led to mass murder, genocide and the horrors of the concentration camps. 

“The Dora Love Prize also wants to encourage students to come up with activities they can undertake in their communities to uphold civil liberties and human rights, the founding stones of civilised societies.”

Teachers and students from more than 15 schools will take part in talks and workshops at a launch event on 26 September. They will be introduced to this year’s theme, ‘The Power of Words’, which is the theme set by the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for Holocaust Memorial Day 2018. The students will design and complete their projects in the coming months, with the winner announced at a special event on 26 January 2018, the day before the international Holocaust Memorial Day, at the University’s Lakeside Theatre.

Dale Banham, Deputy Headteacher at Northgate High School in Ipswich, helped establish the Prize in 2012 and his school has taken part since.

“The Dora Love Prize has many benefits for our students,” Dale said. “Activities that go beyond the curriculum are really important – they’re the experiences people remember from their school days. The Prize supports several subject areas. It helps with the arts as students express ideas around the Holocaust through creative channels, English in terms of students’ use of language and ability to speak and perform in public, and history by deepening their understanding of the Holocaust.

“It also helps raise aspirations and increase access to higher education - the sessions at Essex show students they can fit in at university. Finally, it’s helped us build our community links. We held a related event as part of the Great Get Together in memory of Jo Cox and 15 community groups from our local area in Ipswich came.”

Contact Professor Rainer Schulze at the University of Essex on rainer@essex.ac.uk for more information on how to get involved.