Edinburgh will honour Scottish missionary and Holocaust victim Jane Haining with a 'Stolperstein' memorial

Brass plate will go in pavement outside Edinburgh church

The Church of Scotland has welcomed a decision by Edinburgh City Council to honour missionary Jane Haining, one of the few Scots to die in the Holocaust, with a “Stolperstein” brass plate placed in the pavement outside a city-centre church.

Councillors agreed unanimously to buy and install the plate, a well-established way of recognising Holocaust victims across Europe. It will be placed in the pavement outside the former St Stephen’s Church in the New Town, where a dedication service was held for Ms Haining the day before she left for Hungary in 1932 to work at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, caring for Jewish children. After the Nazis invaded Hungary, she was arrested, imprisoned and then sent to Auschwitz where she died in July 1944. Before she went to Budapest she trained at what was then St Colm’s Women’s Missionary College in Edinburgh’s Inverleith Terrace. And after her death, a memorial service was held at at St George’s West Church in Shandwick Place.

The Stolperstein was proposed by Inverleith SNP councillor Vicky Nicolson, who was keen that Edinburgh should honour her and said the brass plate would be “a reminder of the Holocaust and what that did to the world”. Ms Haining is the only Scot to be named “Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel's memorial to the six million victims of the Holocaust. There are also memorials to her in her home town of Dunscore in Dumfriesshire, in Glasgow where she used to work and in Budapest. And in Midlothian a new residential street in Loanhead was named "Haining Park" in her memory in 2021.

Jane Haining trained in Edinburgh and a dedication service was held at St Stephen's Church in the New Town before she left for Budapest.

The Rt Rev Dr Iain Greenshields, Moderator of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly, said: "We are delighted that Edinburgh city councillors have voted in favour of buying and installing a ‘Stolperstein’ in memory of Jane Haining, who showed tremendous courage in the face of intolerable evil during a dark period of history. A woman of deep Christian faith, she was fully aware of the risks she was taking but repeatedly refused Church of Scotland pleas to leave Budapest and return home to Scotland as the war engulfed Europe.

"Jane was determined to continue doing her duty and stick to her post, saying ‘If these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness?'. She was simultaneously an ordinary and extraordinary woman and her story is one of heroism and personal sacrifice and reminds us that when we feel powerless, there is always something that we can do. Her story is moving, humbling, heart-breaking and inspirational and we hope that this honour will help keep her memory alive for generations to come."