Speaking on Sunday at the main community event to mark the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mrs Wagerman declared: “If there are calls in Britain — from street demonstrators to respected academics — saying ‘kill the Jews’; if synagogues and schools in France are being fire-bombed; if our enemies hate us so much they are training children to seek their own death to kill our children; if large parts of the world can now openly deny the right of Israel to exist, we must not forget where that kind of rhetoric led 60 years ago.”

She added: “There is a great difference between 1942 and 2002. We are no longer at the mercy of politicians and the policies of others. Jews are defended by the forces of a Jewish State.

“The fate of the Jews of Israel and the fate of the Jews of the diaspora are inextricably intertwined.”

A similarly bleak picture of the rise in anti-Semitism in the past 18 months was painted by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, who also addressed the audience of more than 600.

“This year, it’s happening again,” he said. “I speak about five shuls in France attacked over Pesach, one of them burned to the ground; about the attacks on shuls in Brussels and Antwerp and in Canada; and about the lorry filled with explosives that crashed into a shul in Djerba, killing 13 people.”

He also referred to two incidents where a young boy and two girls were attacked in London. “These were not Israeli targets. They were Jewish targets; this is anti-Semitism,” he said.

Such incidents were happening, he said, “because in the past 12 months the floodgates have opened to everything we have fought against for the past 57 years. A wave of hate has filled the world.”

The Holocaust-survivors who identified with the Bosnians in 1991 and the Kosovo Albanians in 1999 — all Muslims — had made it clear that “remembering the Holocaust did not only mean fighting for our fellow Jews. It means fighting the inhumanity that transcended our differences.”

The Board’s senior vice-president, Henry Grunwald, told the audience that they had come together to “look back and look to the future,” to ensure the world never forgot the Holocaust.

Candles were lit by six survivors to honour victims of the Shoah, and a hushed hall heard Cantor Stephen Robins and the Shabbaton Choir recite the Memorial Prayer, Yizkor and Kaddish. The standards of the Association of Jewish ex-Servicemen and Women dipped in salute and the Last Post was sounded by a JLGB trumpeter.