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As a rabbi, it’s an immense blessing to accompany a person to their final resting place. Yesterday, I officiated at the funeral of Gerda Marton, who came to Britain aged only 10 on the 1939 Kindertransport, the Children’s Transport. She was one of 10,000 child refugees that Britain rescued.

Poignantly, Gerda’s funeral was just a few hours before today’s Yom HaShoah - the Jewish Remembrance Day for Holocaust victims. For me, it’s a particular privilege to bury a person with a dignified funeral at 92, rather than them having met the fate that the Nazis intended for them.

Gerda started life at school here with no English at all but quickly picked it up as children of that age are such fast learners.

I wondered what would a 10-year-old Gerda think if she’d arrived here in 2021? What would she have made of modern British schools, especially as over these past weeks, many pupils and now teachers are describing sexual abuse and harassment that they’ve experienced there?

What would a 10-year-old Gerda make of lockdown education? Of accessing unlimited facts and information on those often-unrestricted computers, made available for home learning?

This week, the British Journal of Criminology published a study of the three most popular UK pornography websites. It showed that 1 in 8 of the videos suggested to first-time users were criminal and contravened the sites’ own policies and regulations.

It took me 5 keyboard clicks to access millions of free videos which I couldn’t, wouldn’t, describe on the radio! I can’t erase those mental images that advertise videos without even having watched them. I don’t know how a 10-year-old would either.

If Gerda was in her kitchen listening to the radio now, what might she think? What questions might she ask? How confident would she be to ask adults challenging questions?

Jewish law has developed through asking and answering questions, often uncomfortable ones, which many rabbis would’ve preferred to avoid but, crucially, didn’t.

This is our role as adults - parents, family, friends and teachers. We can enable children to ask those awkward questions and suggest that it's fine to feel embarrassed.

And if young people prefer not to talk to the adults they know, you could point them to other options such as ChildLine or the NSPCC.

10-year-old Gerda didn’t have to process the downside of the internet but today, 10-year-old Malcolm, Maya or Muhammed do and we must be by their side. We might not know the answers but it‘s imperative that we start the conversations.

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