Actor Jason Isaacs to Launch BBC Appeal for Revolutionary Holocaust Program

Central to this BBC campaign is his meeting with Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg, whose life story illustrates exactly why such education remains vital.

By Aaron Sull, Jewish Breaking News

Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs will present this weekend’s BBC Radio 4 charity appeal for Holocaust education, meeting with a 95-year-old survivor whose story is now preserved through groundbreaking virtual reality technology.

For Isaacs, this mission hits close to home. Having grown up in Liverpool’s Childwall suburb within a close-knit Jewish community his immigrant great-grandparents helped establish, the 62-year-old actor has described himself as “profoundly Jewish but not in a religious way.”

Since October 7, he’s frequently appeared wearing a yellow hostage pin and used his platform to speak against antisemitism.

His commitment to Holocaust education runs deep. Back in 2021, Isaacs narrated “Out of the Darkness,” a documentary for Holocaust Learning UK that reached schools nationwide.

More recently, he provided his voice for Jewish Care’s appeal film. What makes this year’s appeal particularly poignant is the urgency behind it.

HET chief executive Karen Pollock told Jewish News that “80 years on from the end of the Holocaust, with survivors becoming fewer and frailer and with antisemitism at dangerously high levels, our mission is more urgent than ever.”

Central to this BBC campaign is his meeting with Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg, whose life story illustrates exactly why such education remains vital.

Born in Kassel, Germany, Goldberg was just nine when war erupted in 1939. While his father managed to escape to Britain days before the war began, young Manfred remained trapped with his mother and younger brother.

Their ordeal began in earnest during December 1941, when all three were deported by train to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia.

Life there meant constant terror, as Nazis regularly selected inmates for mass shootings in nearby forests. Despite these horrific conditions, Goldberg still managed to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in March 1943.

His survival became even more precarious when he was sent to a labor camp three months before the ghetto’s liquidation.

Later, as Allied forces advanced, he endured transfer to Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, where he spent over eight months as a slave worker.

Liberation finally came on May 3, 1945, at Neustadt, Germany, after surviving a brutal death march.

Fast-forward to today, and Goldberg represents something remarkable: a bridge between past and future through cutting-edge technology.

He serves as the face of Testimony 360, HET’s revolutionary VR program that recently won the 2025 Charity Awards.

Goldberg spent five days being filmed from multiple angles, answering over 1,000 questions to create an interactive testimony that allows students to have conversations with him even after he’s gone.

“Never during those dark days of the Holocaust did I ever imagine that one day I would see myself, and my story, immortalized in this way,” Goldberg told Jewish News about experiencing the technology.

“I have spoken to thousands of pupils over the years – perhaps now I will make it millions.”

Since launching in June 2024, demand for Testimony 360 has already doubled HET’s target for school bookings.

Using VR headsets, students can also explore concentration camps like Auschwitz and Stutthof, allowing them to witness the physical remnants of Nazi persecution through digitally recreated experiences.