2025 Dora Love Prize Project Summary

This project summary was written and submitted by Year Nine Northgate High School students Margot & Macey & Xander:

The Dora Love Prize is an annual prize for secondary school students informed by the Holocaust. It asks students to develop projects which link what they have learnt about the Holocaust with the world they live in today, and to take action to put an end to identity-based prejudice, discrimination, marginalisation and violence.

At Northgate High School, we have linked the past to the present through our candleholder design for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Our candleholder has become part of an exhibition that is currently touring the country.

We also developed a workshop for local schools with a local artist to remember the victims of the Holocaust. This workshop was called from Art to Archives and is designed to keep the memory of Frank Bright’s class alive through interpretive art.

The Dora Love Prize also encourages young people to speak up against hatred wherever it occurs, never forgetting the ultimate consequence of seemingly small acts of discrimination and developing a sense of personal responsibility. For this theme we have been working on a ‘Deaf Perspectives’ project that aims to raise awareness of the way in which deaf people can be marginalised in society today. We have made a film that shows how we all have a responsibility to learn how to support people with hidden disabilities and make them feel part of our school community.

Candleholder Project

Our candleholder is a tribute to Frank Bright, a Holocaust survivor, who regularly visited our school between 2012 and 2022. Frank sadly died in 2023 and we wanted to commemorate the enormous contribution he made to our school helping us understand the horrors of the Holocaust and our responsibility for speaking out and standing up against discrimination today.

We researched the story of his classmates from Prague (1942), many of whom were murdered at Auschwitz. The names of these individuals and Frank’s mum and dad (both murdered at Auschwitz) are inscribed on our candleholder. Our candle holder consists of 3 tiers representing the past, present and the future. It is made from oak and acrylic with each tier having atmospheric down lighting.

Our candleholder is both a memorial to the past and a call for action in the present. We aim to shape a better future by working with and supporting community groups who stand up, speak out and support people who are the victims of discrimination today. We also hope to raise awareness of both the Holocaust and modern-day hate crimes through QR codes on our candleholder that tell the stories of the victims of hate crimes, alongside campaigners who fought for change.

In January, we presented our candleholder at the Suffolk Holocaust Memorial Day, at the University of Suffolk. We also organised a local community event in May to showcase the candleholder before it left the school as part of a national touring exhibition. We invited the BBC and local radio to this event, which can be seen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz79447rdd3o

Workshop

We are also very proud of the workshop we helped to develop with a local artist (Dan Emery). This involved using the inspiration of Picasso to remember Frank Bright’s classmates who were murdered during the Holocaust. Our aim was to memorialise Jewish students, the same age as us, who did not survive Auschwitz. As part of our research for this project we used archive sources from Yad Vashem. The outcome was a beautiful array of artwork that was created at a workshop at the Hold in Ipswich, attended by students from local schools:

Film project

A group of Dora Love Prize students have also taken part in a project called ‘Deaf Perspectives’. The students that took part learnt about being deaf and how it is to be a student who is deaf. Also, while on a trip in Cambridge, the students learnt about the history of hearing technologies.  The students also visited The Hold to look at historical documents and items from deaf people in the past including a photo album made by a deaf person.  We have used this research to create a film with the Offshoot Foundation to raise awareness of deaf perspectives. This film will be launched at the Hold in June.

The event is listed here:

Northgate High School

Sidegate Lane Ipswich IP4 3DL

Northgate High School embraces the three core values of Respect, Determination and Teamwork. These values are fundamental to the calm and positive learning environment that we strive to achieve at all levels across the school.

Events with Northgate High School

• Deaf Perspectives: Past, present and future
  Sat 28th Jun 2025

Who wrote this about Ipswich?

Sam Sherman

Sam is a Co-Founder of Ipswich.love. Passionate about Ipswich, Sam looks to see how we might jointly reverse some of the recent negativity and bring some deserved positivity back to our beloved Town.