Yad Vashem to reach five million Shoah victims' name records

Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, expects to reach a benchmark of five million names of Shoah victims in the next few years, according to a statement made by the institution.

Yad Vashem has been gathering names of Holocaust victims as part of it mandate and mission, on behalf of the Israeli government and the Jewish people since the 1950s. To date, it has collected some 4,800,000 identities of Jewish men, women, and children murdered during the Shoah. In 2022 alone, Yad Vashem managed to locate some 40,000 additional Holocaust victims' names.

According to Yad Vashem expert estimates, in the coming years, some 200,000-300,000 names could be added to the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names – leading to a total of more than five million identities out of the estimated six million victims of the Holocaust.

"As we move further away from the events of the Holocaust, our task of remembrance and commemoration becomes much more challenging," the director of the Yad Vashem's Hall of Names and its Names Recovery Project Dr. Alexander Avram said on Wednesday. "While it is still possible to collect new names, it will be at a reduced rate."

Gathering testimony from Holocaust survivors, while we still can

"Naturally, the survivors of the Holocaust and their contemporaries are getting fewer, and those who never managed to give testimony or register names will no longer be able to do so. Despite all these challenges, we remain committed to the cause, and are in contact with many archives and institutions that deal with remembrance and commemoration worldwide, in the hope that we will be able to achieve this goal," he explained.

Avram also pointed to objective difficulties in the work of locating the names.