Holocaust Names Recovery Project

Holocaust Name Recovery Project

Holocaust Names Recovery Project

JGSGB is supporting the work of Yad Vashem’s Names Recovery Project at https://yvng.yadvashem.org/  We want to encourage everyone to create Pages of Testimony (see https://www.yadvashem.org/downloads.html#pot) for registering the names of those who perished in the Holocaust.  Each Page of Testimony contains a victim's name, biographical details, and a photograph when available.

Over the past 50 years, Yad Vashem has been working to recover the names of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, but to date only about 4 million names are memorialized in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Holocaust victims at https://yvng.yadvashem.org/.  Millions of victims remain unidentified and Yad Vashem has put out an urgent call to recover their names through a worldwide Names Recovery Project.  This is a race against time, before those who remember the victims are no longer with us.

JGSGB would like to encourage you to do 3 things to support the Names Recovery Project:

  1. To check your own family tree to identify any Holocaust victims and then to ensure that a Page of Testimony has been filled out for each and every Holocaust victim
  2. To mention the Names Recovery Project to everyone we know, especially to those who might not be involved in genealogy, but who may have Holocaust victims in their families.
  3. Because we genealogists are good at capturing “Vital Data”, to help others people to fill in Pages of Testimony.

So What Do You Do Next?

  1. Identify the Name of a Holocaust Victim
  2. Check the Database of Holocaust Victims Names, at https://yvng.yadvashem.org/ which is available online, to see whether a Page of Testimony has already been filled out for that person or child. Remember that unless someone has specifically filled out a Page of Testimony for a particular person, it will not be in this Database.  The Pages of Testimony Project was started in the 1950’s so one may find a record for a family member already filled in & submitted in the 1950’s by another family member or a friend or neighbour of the victim.
  3. If no record is found in the database, fill in a separate page for each and every person and submit it to Yad Vashem, either online or by post.  This is a link to a blank Page of Testimony and the instructions on how to complete it: https://www.yadvashem.org/downloads.html#pot