Dr. Agnes Kory is a distinguished Hungarian-born British-Jewish musicologist, cellist, educator, and Holocaust survivor. She is the founder and executive director of the Bela Bartok Centre for Musicianship in London.
Dr. Kory is a leading authority on the works of the renowned Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. After an active career as a cellist on the international stage, she turned to music education and academic research, championing Bartók’s humanistic musical philosophy.
She has repeatedly used her status as a Holocaust survivor to publicly oppose the Israeli government’s instrumentalization of Jewish historical trauma to justify occupation policies in Gaza and the West Bank. She maintains that the lesson of the Holocaust is “never again for anyone.” As an active member of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), she has been a vocal opponent of the political “witch-hunts” in the UK. She has signed numerous open letters to the Labour leadership and attended rallies in Parliament Square to expose the weaponization of antisemitism definitions.
Between 2023 and 2026, she authored multiple public letters calling on the academic and cultural worlds to focus on the plight of Palestinian artists and supported boycotts against state-linked Israeli cultural institutions, arguing that “depoliticized” exchange in the face of occupation is a whitewash. Despite her advanced age, Dr. Kory is a regular presence at anti-war demonstrations in London. She often carries signs reminding the world that as a Bergen-Belsen survivor, she has a duty to point out the chilling parallels between historic atrocities and the collective punishment in Gaza.
She compared her childhood experiences to Gaza, saying sadly, “After I survived, nobody was trying to bomb me and kill me anymore… I am not convinced that these people in Gaza will not continue to be under threat of being killed and hurt.”