TV’s famous barrister ‘Judge’ Rob Rinder returned from filming at Nazi death camp Auschwitz the day he was guest speaker at a Jewish school’s fundraising gala in Mill Hill.

Fans of legal dramas will be familiar with Rinder's ITV studio courtroom putting his legal cross-examination skills and satirical sass to the test, handling often vexing civil suits.

He is also known for his quest to trace his own Jewish family’s survival of the Holocaust with the BBC’s family genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?

But his latest appearance was helping Mill Hill’s Etz Chaim Primary school get through its financial crisis at the gala held at Mill Hill Synagogue.

The school’s President, Lord Levy, welcomed ‘Judge’ Rinder as guest speaker after he returned that day from Poland filming a documentary on Auschwitz.

“The trip was focused on the tragedy of the past,” Judge Rinder explained. “But seeing a hall filled with a community of parents and grandparents wanting to support the school and the future of Judaism was just the tonic I needed.”

Rinder's Lithuanian grandfather Morris was one of 300 children arriving in the Lake District in 1945 who had survived the Nazi Holocaust that devastated Europe’s Jewish population. His other grandfather on his father’s side, Harry Rinder, was born in Stepney in 1928.

The “Windermere children”, as they became known, had been rescued by British liberation forces from the Nazi death camps — their families lost among the six million Jews murdered in the worst genocide in history.

‘Judge’ Rinder also featured in the BBC series My Family, the Holocaust and Me, helping descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors to uncover their family stories previously heard “only in hints and whispers”, the Mill Hill gala learned.

Etz Chaim school’s headteacher Hannah Martin revealed the challenges facing all schools with funding and budgets squeezed trying to pay for heating and meals. Fundraising by parents was once “a nice additional income” but was now needed for essentials, she explained.

The school’s co-chair of Governors Elizabeth Bennett who organised the gala said: “Every school is feeling the impact of rising costs with budgets becoming more stretched.”

The gala raised £25,000 and marked the school’s 10th anniversary — now struggling to survive.