Yad Vashem Confirms Names of 5 Million Holocaust Victims

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial center, has announced that it has succeeded in confirming the names of five million Jews who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. The center describes this achievement as "historic" in its decades-long mission to restore the identities of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

This important announcement comes at a time when the number of Holocaust survivors who can provide testimony is dwindling. According to calculations by the Claims Conference, nearly half of the approximately 200,000 survivors living today will not be with us in the next seven years, which makes the urgency of the work to restore names even more critical.

Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan noted: "Reaching five million names is both an important milestone and a reminder of our unfinished duty. Behind every name is a life that mattered—a child who never grew up, a parent who never returned home, a voice that was silenced forever."

The process of restoring names is based on various sources, including "Pages of Testimony" filled out by survivors and relatives, through which about 2.8 million names have been collected. In addition, researchers use historical documents—letters, diaries, Nazi records, deportation lists—as well as modern technologies like artificial intelligence, which allows for the analysis of vast archival materials.

Despite the titanic efforts, Yad Vashem is aware that the names of the remaining one million victims will likely never be fully known, as no documents about their deaths have survived. Nevertheless, they believe that with the use of new technologies, it is possible to restore about 250,000 more names.