by Cynthia Wroclawski

“I waited 60 years for this miracle to happen!” exclaimed 84-year-old Giselle Rosenfeld after reuniting with her cousin Isaac Sacks, 78. Both survived the Holocaust; neither knew of any surviving family—until now. Rosenfeld and Sacks are just two of the hundreds of survivors and their decedents who have discovered and reunited with long-lost family since the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names was uploaded to the Internet in November 2004.

Since then, over seven million people worldwide have visited the site of the online Database (www.yadvashem.org). The advanced capability allows visitors to search for names of family or friends who were murdered in the Holocaust, and then either check details already given or submit new Pages of Testimony. Over 150,000 additional names and biographical details have been added to the Database in the past year.

A Public Mission
A paramount objective of Yad Vashem in uploading of the Database is to raise awareness of Yad Vashem’s mission to recover as many names as possible. “Time is running out,” asserts Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate. “There is still a tremendous amount of work to be done and we are counting on the assistance of the public to take part in this sacred mission: to ensure no Holocaust victim will be forgotten to future generations.”

The greatest challenge in reaching out to the public is the fact that survivors and other populations who can bear witness are reaching the ends of their lives. A large segment of this population may be not be computer literate; others believe that in order to bear witness one is required to be a blood relative, or know the entire life story of the victim, or even be Jewish. Some survivors even think that testimony they gave to other organizations is automatically incorporated in the Names Database. None of this is true.

Recognizing that a majority of the survivors need assistance in submitting names, Yad Vashem is counting on Jewish agencies, students, Holocaust centers, synagogues, survivor and next generation groups to spearhead names recovery programs and in their communities and schools. A resource guide with a comprehensive toolkit of practical materials for promoting and implementing grass-roots campaigns has been created and will soon be available online.

A Work in Progress
Parallel with its outreach efforts, Yad Vashem plans to accelerate the retrieval of names from archival lists. This mostly untapped—but immense—source of names has been gathered over the years from various lists of pre-war Jewish communities, as well as Nazi-era accounts of property confiscations, deportations, camp and ghetto inmates and (rarely) deaths, located at Yad Vashem and other archives. Over the next six years, staff will scrutinize these millions of documents for names of Shoah victims. Relevant information will then be entered into the Database.

“The importance of these lists as complementary information to the Pages of Testimony cannot be under-estimated,” asserts Dr. Yaacov Lozowick, Director of the Archives at Yad Vashem “There are many Shoah victims for whom no-one remains to bear witness to their story—either due to the passage of time or because entire communities were wiped off the face of the earth. In these circumstances, and many others, the only evidence of their existence lies hidden within these millions of pieces of archival information.”

The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names was created an uploaded to the Internet with the vision and generous support of the following individuals and organizations: the Victim List Project of the Swiss Banks Settlement, under the direction of Chief Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court; Hi Tech Entrepreneur Yossie Hollander; the Noaber Foundation; and the Claims Conference.

To learn about how you can help the outreach effort, please contact names.outreach@yadvashem.org.il. To ensure the continuation of Yad Vashem’s Names Recovery Project through the provision of financial assistance, please contact international.relations@yadvashem.org.il

The author is Marketing Manager for the Online Names Database.
 

John Wald, 59, from Belgium and his maternal aunt, Evgenya (Gitel) Kotlyarskaya, 82.

John’s mother, Basia Fischer, and two sisters left their parents, brother and Gitel in Kornalowice in 1938 for Belgium; after the war, the three sisters were told the rest of the family had perished. However, while searching the Names Database last year, John found a Page of Testimony submitted by Gitel (now Evgenya) at Yad Vashem a few years earlier. After a four-month search, he finally found Evgenya, and flew to Moscow last November for an emotional reunion with his aunt, two cousins and their children. “It was wonderful,” John wrote. “It is a new family for me.”

“It was an extremely moving experience to see my family history located in the Database… It is a wonderful thing you have done – not only keeping the memories alive, but also allowing those of us far away to look back into those memories that are quickly fading.”
Orie H. Niedzviecki, Toronto, Canada

“Thank you so much for your enormous work with the Database, and thousands of thanks for the memory of all these victims.”
Susanne Hooge, Denmark

“Within 48 hours after the Database had gone online, a close friend of mine discovered a family relative living in Tel Aviv. She provided my friend with information on what had happened to her father and her aunts. Most of all, she provided her with a living link to the past. No other historical instrument I know of can do that.”
Prof. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Emory University, and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.

 

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