Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority (1953-2003)

Introduction

World Documentation Center

Names Repository

International Research Center and Publications

Righteous Among the Nations

Museums

Commemoration

Education

Yad Vashem as a Focus

Development Project

Conclusion

The Names Repository

In 1955, Yad Vashem began actively collecting Pages of Testimony in Israel and around the world. Pages of Testimony commemorate the names and biographic details of Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The martyred dead are remembered not as cold, anonymous numbers, but as individual human beings. The Pages of Testimony are an attempt to give them back their personal identity, and dignity, which the Nazis and their accomplices tried so hard to obliterate. Pages of Testimony are kept for posterity in the Hall of Names. The number of victims’ names collected on Pages of Testimony is 2.2 million to date. 

In recent years, Yad Vashem has scanned and computerized this names repository, and made tremendous efforts to collect and computerize additional names from different lists and archival documentation. The names database currently contains about 3.2 million names. The names database is a vital source in searches for information about family members, and Yad Vashem receives about 20,000 requests for names searches annually. The names database went online in November 2004.

Yad Vashem is at the forefront of the commemorative project "Unto Every Person There Is A Name," in which hundreds of thousands of victims' names are read annually throughout Jewish communities in the Diaspora. In Israel, names are read in the Knesset, schools, local authorities, higher education institutions, youth movements, army camps, commemorative institutes and workplaces.

The Jewish Agency, the World Jewish Congress, the Council for Jewry in the Former Soviet Union, Bnai Brith, the Israel Information Center are also partners in this project, which is under the auspices of the Speaker of the Knesset.