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Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, has identified five million of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust — a milestone which was reached after roughly seven decades of painstaking research.
As the number of Holocaust survivors continues to decline, Yad Vashem officials say the effort to preserve names and memories has taken on new urgency, ensuring that future generations will still have access to personal testimonies and records.
“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.”
Despite the progress, however, some one million victims remain unidentified.
Many of those names may never be known, though Yad Vashem researchers hope that modern technologies — including artificial intelligence and machine learning — will help uncover more details.
By digitally analyzing hundreds of millions of archival documents once too vast to process manually, experts say as many as 250,000 additional names could still be recovered.
The recovered names are preserved in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, available online in six languages.
The database uses advanced algorithms to cross-reference name and place variants, assembling hundreds of thousands of detailed “personal files” from archival material that document both the lives and the fates of individual victims.
The global name-recovery project relies on collaboration with Jewish communities, archives, genealogical organizations, and research institutions worldwide.
A key component has been the Pages of Testimony—single-page memorials submitted by survivors, relatives, and friends honoring those who were killed. To date, more than 2.8 million names have been recorded through these pages, submitted in over 20 languages.
“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.
“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. Each had a life and a story, as real and precious as any other. The Nazis aimed not only to murder them, but to erase their existence and by identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures.”
Yad Vashem’s researchers continue to examine personal letters, diaries, Nazi documents, deportation lists, census data, and postwar legal files related to Nazi war crimes. Less conventional sources have included inscriptions on tombstones in Jewish cemeteries and memorial plaques in synagogues, each helping to fill small but critical gaps in the collective record of Jewish life destroyed during the Holocaust.