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Advancing Towards Online Access:
Shoah
Victims’ Names Database
by
Zvi Bernhardt
UJC Major Gifts
Chairman and American Society for Yad Vashem Executive
Committee Member Mark Wilf searchers the Shoah Victims’ Names
Database at the GA |
“What a treasure trove... I will be sending more Pages [of
Testimony] in as soon as possible.”
“My most successful discovery was a ... chazan [cantor] at
the Adass Yisroel congregation in Berlin, born in Latvia in
1853—thus confirming my late grandmother's claim ... I have been
looking for this for 30 years and your site solved it.”
Within
the next few months, Yad Vashem hopes to meet the tremendous
challenge of uploading its database of Shoah victims’ names
onto the Internet. This uniquely interactive website will enable Yad Vashem to complete one
of the most important missions in its 50-year history: to gather
information about—and thus memorialize—every man, woman and child
murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Shoah.
In turn, the site will be used by, and benefit, the community of
those very people who contributed to its formation: the friends,
relatives and acquaintances of the six million Holocaust victims.
This
crucial
project
is being supported by businessman
and hi-tech entrepreneur Yossie Hollander.
Recently,
Chief
Judge
Edward Korman
of the Eastern district
of New York,
who is
responsible for
distributing funds
from the settlement agreement with
the
Swiss
banks,
announced his support
of
uploading the
Shoah
Victims’
Names
Database
as part of a
more extensive
list of
all the
victims
of the Nazi regime.
Attorney
Judah Gribetz,
the
court-appointed
representative
supervising
the compensation process,
is in frequent contact with Yad Vashem in order to actualize
Judge Korman’s
decision.
Since its inception 50 years ago, Yad Vashem has been gathering
names and biographical details of Holocaust victims via firsthand
testimony of relatives and witnesses, documented lists, and
(primarily) through the hundreds of thousands of Pages of
Testimony submitted to the Hall of Names. With approximately four
million records of names digitized to date, this database is the
largest resource of its kind, and
has, in
fact, been accessible to the general public at Yad Vashem for
almost four years.
The
importance of making the database available on the Internet cannot
be underestimated. As the generation of Holocaust survivors and
witnesses is drawing to an end, this is the last chance to collect
names of Holocaust victims.
Once
online, this massive database will for the first time become
accessible to any person, anywhere in the world. It is hoped that
this will encourage those who have not yet had the opportunity to
come to Yad Vashem to check if the names of their dear ones are
memorialized. If not, they will be able to fill out Pages of
Testimony online, which will then be added to the database.
Four pilot projects have allowed the design team to further
fine-tune the site. The projects gave specific groups of people
online access to the database for a
limited period of time: the
first, a group of high school students in Jerusalem; the
second, attendants of the 23rd
International Conference on Jewish Genealogy held last July in
Washington, D.C; the third,
United Jewish Communities General Assembly participants in
Jerusalem (November);
and the fourth, participants in
the
Israel Business Forum organized by the Globes Group
(December)..
After the Washington conference, Gary Mokotoff, a major figure in
the Jewish Genealogy world, wrote in his widely distributed
newsletter: “The system is very well thought out... I would be
happy if one-tenth of the software I used was of the quality that
existed in the preliminary version of what Yad Vashem has
developed.”
Dana Porath, Content Manager of Yad Vashem’s website, assisted GA
participants to surf the new site. She estimated
that out of some 900 searches, an astonishing 80 percent
resulted in a positive find. “Many of the participants were pretty
skeptical about discovering a previously unknown relative in the
database, so they were often amazed at what they found. Of course,
to identify relatives or friends who perished during the Shoah
does bring some form of closure. However, what was most rewarding
for us, and those who conducted the searches, was that many of
them found relatives—first cousins, uncles, great-aunts—who had
submitted Pages of Testimony and were still alive. With the aid of
mobile phones, contact between the families were made almost
instantaneously: the sheer joy and overwhelming gratitude of those
people will remain with me for a long time.”
In all our
projects, the public succeeded in accessing and navigating
the database with ease. This was, in large part, due to
the
unique search system developed at Yad Vashem—the most powerful of
its type in the world—which enables highly accurate retrieval of
information, beyond standard phonetical searches. The system takes
into account alternative names of people and places, which can
result from use of multiple languages, historical changes, and
cultural traditions in the source testimonies and documents.
Indeed,
a major
challenge for members of staff working in the Hall of Names was
transliterating the information recorded in Hebrew on Pages of
Testimony into Latin characters. This is no simple task: the same
three Hebrew letters written without vowels, for example, can
actually spell a few different names. Accurate transliteration is
ensured through close cooperation between Yad Vashem’s experts in
geography and linguistics and data systems specialists.
In addition,
Yad
Vashem’s International School of Holocaust Studies is currently
developing a set of online educational tools
around the
database.
The School
will use the information on the website to produce
specialized
educational programs
in
order to
impart to
future generations the meaning of the Shoah and the
individual experiences
of its victims.
The
website will, therefore, provide access to the years of
accumulated experience and knowledge available at Yad Vashem. In
the words of Alexander Avraham, Director of the Hall of Names:
“The technological tools are just that—tools to enable one to
glance at a Page of Testimony for a beloved father written by a
survivor in the 1950s, tools to enhance our ability to record the
recollections of an eighty-year-old lady, tools that put together
all those bits and pieces of memories and help us to see the vivid
image of those individual innocents who were murdered.”
The
author is Deputy Director of Reference and Information Services
and Head of Data Processing in the Hall of Names
Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |
