Yad Vashem adds 1.5 million names to list over past decade; four million names currently known, some 2.2 million come from Pages of Testimony.
By GIL STERN STERN SHEFLER, LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZIyad vashem 311(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Yad Vashem announced on Tuesday that it has identified two-thirds of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, a total of four million names thus far.“In the past decade we have succeeded in adding about 1.5 million victims’ names to the Names Database, increasing by some 60 percent the information we had,” said Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev.RELATED:Yad Vashem struggles to teach Holocaust to ArabsYad Vashem speaks out against rabbinic prohibitionYad Vashem program aims to teach Chinese about Shoah“The Germans sought not only to destroy the Jews, but to obliterate any memory of them,” he continued. “One of Yad Vashem’s central missions since its foundation, the recovery of each and every victim’s name and personal story, has resulted in relentless efforts to restore the names and identities of as many of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices as possible.”In 2004, Yad Vashem launched the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names on its website. At the same time, a new project to recover unknown names was initiated. Names are recovered via Pages of Testimony, special forms filled out in memory of the victims by people who remember them, and by combing archival lists and documentation for names.Of the four million names currently known, some 2.2 million (about 55%) come from Pages of Testimony and the remainder from various archival sources and postwar commemoration projects.Alexander Avraham, director of the Holocaust museum’s Hall of Names, said that “during the last five years we have concentrated our names recovery efforts in areas where most of the names remain unknown.“We have made great progress,” he went on. “In 2005, we knew the names of some 20% of Jews murdered in Ukraine; today we know 35%. In Belorussia, the figure has risen from 23% to 37% today, Poland (1938 borders) from 35% to 46%, Hungary from 45% to 65%, and Greece from 35% to 70%.”While in Western Europe there were often lists kept of the Jews and deportation, making identification easier, in Eastern European countries and the areas of the former Soviet Union, as well as Greece, much information was still lacking.Concluded Shalev, “We will continue our efforts to recover the unknown names, and by harnessing technology in the service of memory, we are able to share their names with the world.”
