Names of 5M holocaust victims now compiled in single database

By Zev Stub

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Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said Monday that it has recovered the names of five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, a milestone it called “historic” in its decades-long mission to restore the identities of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

The announcement comes as the number of living Holocaust survivors able to give testimony dwindles, Yad Vashem said. Of about 200,000 Holocaust survivors living today, about half will no longer be with us in seven years, according to a calculation made by the Claims Conference earlier this year.

The names of the remaining one million Jewish victims will probably never be known, Yad Vashem said, although new technologies like AI and machine learning may make it possible for as many as 250,000 more to be uncovered.

“Reaching five million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan. “Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”

Yad Vashem said its global campaign to recover names has relied heavily on partnerships with Jewish communities, archives, genealogical societies and research institutions worldwide. A cornerstone of the effort is its Pages of Testimony project — one-page memorial forms filled out by survivors, relatives and friends. To date, 2.8 million names have been collected through these pages, written in more than 20 languages. The collection was recognized by UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013.

Researchers have also used personal letters, diaries, Nazi documentation and deportation lists, census data, and legal documentation from proceedings against Nazi criminals and collaborators to gather data, as well as some less-conventional initiatives like researchers combing through tombstones in Jewish cemeteries and memorial plaques in synagogues.

A worker peruses the documents archive at The Moshal Shoah Legacy Campus and The David and Fela Shapell Family Collections Center, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, July 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

“The Pages of Testimony are symbolic headstones,” said Dr. Alexander Avram, Director of the Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, who has led the program for 37 years. “Most of the victims of the Holocaust were left without graves, without traces — remembered now only through the Pages of Testimony that bear their names. By identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures.”

The names are compiled in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, which is accessible online in six languages. By using variants of names and places and with the help of especially-developed algorithms, the database includes hundreds of thousands of “personal files” aggregated from archival sources that tell about the lives and fates of the individual victims.

Over the years, the database has helped countless families commemorate loved ones and discover and reunite with lost relatives, Yad Vashem said.

The milestone will be highlighted at a seminar at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on November 6 and at an event hosted by the Yad Vashem USA Foundation in New York on November 9.

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