Speech by Anne H Anderson

Thank you Rabbi Tobias it is an honour to be invited to participate in this important service and to share with everyone here some of what we are doing in the Jane Haining Memorial Project. I bring good wishes from Mary Miller from whose biography of Jane Haining we have heard but who is unable for family reasons to be here this morning. Mary’s biography was the stimulus for our project. After she spoke to the West of Scotland Branch of the Council of Christians and Jews, a small project group was formed to explore how to make Jane Haining better known in Scotland and to highlight her story’s contemporary relevance to issues of antisemitism, racism and discrimination more broadly.

Our group is a real interfaith endeavour and I am delighted that several of the committee are here today including Walter Hecht and Michael Carroll who will be known to many of the congregation here as well as Sister Isobel Smyth. Other members who have made great contributions include Mary Miller, Miriam Jackson, Judy Russell whose father Ernest Levi was a holocaust survivor, Father Gerry Dillon, Rev Ian Alexander, Rev Maggie McTearnan and Pam Mitchell who has been responsible for keeping Jane’s story alive for many years in her home village of Dunscore in Dumfriesshire.

Our goal is to raise awareness of the life and legacy of Jane Haining and its importance and relevance today particularly among young people. We have been working for the last two years throughout the restrictions of the pandemic but we have managed to make progress and have had some modest success in fundraising which is allowing us to begin pilot work in schools this year.

Background

The hope is that, by learning from the example of Jane Haining, people are better able to consider the complexities and challenges of living in a racially and religiously diverse society, and also more confident to build bridges across difference, and to see in those who are different not someone who is “other”, but someone who shares a common humanity.

Project Values:

The project is rooted in the value of loving kindness, as expressed in the Hebrew word Chesed, and so eminently expressed in the life of Jane Haining. Chesed is the foundation for

* Our conviction that we belong to one human family

* our appreciation, reverence and respect for diversity and the uniqueness of each human being

* our determination to work to overcome discrimination and to further understanding, acceptance, and kindness between cultures, to ensure peaceful co-existence and stability in our world today.

Project Aims:

* To make the life and legacy of Jane Haining better known

* Through learning about Jane’s life, to enable young people to be more confident in speaking up and acting against prejudice, to be more confident about engaging with people who have a different faith or ethnic origin, and to be better equipped to do so constructively.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is ‘Ordinary People’. For me and many of our committee that is what makes Jane Haining’s story so compelling. In the Author’s Note that precedes the Biography, Mary Miller writes ;
‘Among some of those who already know of her there is a tendency to regard her as a saint. The problem with sainthood is that it tends to mythologise its subject and to lose the details of the life that was actually lived - the life of a real person ………..
It seemed important to me to rescue Jane from sainthood. She only had the tools of an ordinary person, with which she lived a life of unusual unselfishness , bravery and commitment. ……..
Her story compels us to remember the Holocaust …..Through the details of one lost life we realise the uniqueness of all and need to remember …six million individuals. Jane Haining was one of them.’

An ordinary woman who did the right thing is an inspiring example but it leads us to the question of Jane’s motivation. When I first heard about her story many years ago, I was of course struck by her bravery but as a member of the Church of Scotland I was very uncomfortable about how she was described as a missionary and a Christian martyr. Mary Miller in her research for her book tackles this issue head on. In Jane’s own correspondence we have an illuminating letter to her cousin, which again underlines the ordinary woman.

‘ I am afraid it was almost as big a surprise to me as anyone to find myself appointed to a Missionary post but I am happy in my work,.......Do you remember .. I said it was my ambition to have charge of a home for girls - the remark was made in connection with the Bridge of Weir Homes of which we had been speaking. Well when the time came I resigned my post in Paisley - to the horror and dismay of almost all my friends - and took a course of Domestic training in the Domestic Science College in Glasgow ….I saw this post advertised …..so you see I approached not from the
Missionary side but from the Girls’ Home side. ‘

My church has like many others a lot to repent in its attitudes, such as having a Mission to the Jews in Hungary from the 19th century onwards but Jane Haining went to work there to care for girls of any religion. And did so with love and respect.

Our project hopes that in our work with young people it is the aspect of an ordinary person doing the right thing that will resonate and inspire.

For me that is certainly the case. It is the very ordinary details of Jane’s life against the background of extraordinary events that touch me. In her will, witten as she faced surgery in the midst of the war raging around, Jane specifies how she wants her very modest belongings to be disposed of, including that her fur coat is to go to her Hungarian friend Margaret.

In the events that lead up to her arrest, it is likely that she has been up at the crack of dawn to trudge round Budapest to get vegetables to make soup for her girls. She confronted the man who was to denounce her to the Gestapo because he was eating a meal in the Girls home - taking precious food intended for the pupils. She denied only one charge made against her - that of being involved in politics - as she was too busy.

Too busy doing the ordinary and important things to make all her pupils Jewish and non-Jewish as safe and secure as possible, in terrible times. This is what we learn inspired the girls in her care and we hope will inspire many other young people today.

Through a small grant from the Pollock Trust and financial support from the Council of Christians and Jews we have been able to appoint a part-tile project officer. Mr William McGair is a retired teacher who has worked with pupils at Dumfries Academy on the story of their former pupil. This year we will begin pilot work in two secondary schools, most probably Dumfries Academy and Woodfarm Secondary here in East Renfrewshire to explore the existing educational materials on Jane Haining and to develop the resources in ways that encourage pupils to reflect on what they can learn from her story to help them deal with contemporary challenges of discrimination in all its forms. Following this pilot study, we hope to roll out the materials to other schools so that many more young people in Scotland and beyond learn from the life of Jane Haining about how as an ordinary person you can make the world a better place. Thank you for listening.

Jane Haining : A life of love and courage (2019) Mary Miller. Birlinn.