Why Collect Names?

"And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem), an everlasting name that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah 56:5)

Since 1955, Yad Vashem has worked to fulfill its mandate to preserve the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust by collecting their names, the ultimate representation of a person’s identity.

Millions of victims remain unidentified. Yad Vashem urgently calls upon Jewish communities to recover their names through a worldwide Names Recovery Project. Unless we assume collective responsibility for completing this vital mission, some of them may be lost forever. This is a race against time, before those who remember them are no longer with us.

We invite you to join communities throughout the world in this historic mission of the Jewish people by helping to initiate a grass-roots names recovery campaign through your local synagogue, community center, welfare agencies, survivor and next generation groups, universities, schools or camps. This guide shows you how.