Uploading the Central Database of Holocaust Victims’ Names onto the Internet is an important milestone in the history of Holocaust commemoration.
The Database is the result of 50 years of work by Yad Vashem, collecting the names of Holocaust victims. In the last five years, Pages of Testimony and lists of victims have been scanned and digitized so that they can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, at any time.  The Database currently contains over 3 million names of Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In the first month after it was uploaded (November 2004), over 3 million people from 163 countries entered the Database.

In 1998, the international commission handling dormant Swiss bank accounts – The Volker Commission – entrusted Yad Vashem with the task of digitizing the names database at Yad Vashem. The project to digitize the Pages of Testimony was one of the most sensitive and complex operations ever handled by Yad Vashem. The millions of Pages were scanned, and each day, over a period of about five months, approximately 1000 people (mostly students specially trained for this task) deciphered and typed out the names, which had been written in tens of different languages. At the end of the project, over 4 million names were handed over to the Volker Commission, approximately 3 million of which were names of Holocaust victims.

The process of scanning archival materials and transferring them into digitized format is carried out in the Digitization Center at Yad Vashem. The materials include written documents, photographs, and audio/video tapes. The rate of digitization is currently 2 terabytes (1 tera = 1 million mega) per month.  

The Central Database of Holocaust Victims’ Names was uploaded onto the Internet in November 2004, at a special press conference called at Yad Vashem and attended by Minister of Education, Culture and Sport Limor Livnat.
Photograph: The Minister conducting a search for family members on the Database. Left: Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate.

The digitization of all the databases at Yad Vashem is a national mission and a unique technological challenge.  When completed, any individual will be able to access a picture of every victim, every survivor and every place or event in Holocaust history about whom or about which information exists.
Photograph: Mr. Yossi Hollander, Hi-Tech initiator and important donor to the “International Digitization Project”, searching for names of family members on the Central Database of Holocaust Victims’ Names.