Israel’s Holocaust Museum says names of 5 million of 6 million victims identified | World News
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, has said that it has identified the names of five million Jews killed in the Holocaust. According to Yad Vashem, the five million milestone marks seven decades of its work.Making the announcement on Monday, Yad Vashem said it is committed to recovering the identities of those murdered the Nazis during World War II.
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AI to help identify more Holocaust victims
Israeli researchers also expressed confidence that with further help from artificial intelligence (AI), even more names could be recovered.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. (Photo: Reuters)
Some one million Jewish victims are still unknown, “and many will likely remain so forever,” Yad Vashem said. But with tools such as AI and machine learning, it believes it could recover another 250,000 names analysing hundreds of millions of documents that have been too extensive to research manually.
Holocaust survivors shrinking
With the number of Holocaust survivors shrinking and the world soon to be without first-hand witnesses, Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said reaching the five million milestone was a reminder of an unfinished obligation.
“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,” Dayan said. “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.”
Nearly 200,000 Holocaust survivors are currently alive, but according to a calculation made the Claims Conference earlier this year, nearly half of them won’t be around in another seven years.
How Holocaust survivors were identified
In May 2024, Yad Vashem had said it had developed its own AI-powered software to comb through piles of records to try to identify hundreds of thousands of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust whose names are missing from official memorials.
At the time, it had tracked down information on 4.9 million individuals reading through statements and documents, checking film footage, cemeteries and other records.
The names of Holocaust victims, as well as personal files that tell about the lives of many of them, are compiled in an online Yad Vashem database in six languages.
Around 6 millions jews were killed the Nazis in the Holocaust. (Photo: Reuters)
This database, it noted, has helped countless families reunite with lost relatives and families to commemorate loved ones, particularly as most victims were left without graves.
“The Nazis aimed not only to murder them, but to erase their exence. And identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, who heads the central database of victims’ names.
