JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony memorial repository was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
Yad Vashem has collected the Pages of Testimony — forms that were filled out in memory of Jewish Holocaust victims — since 1954. Some 2.6 million names have been documented.
It is the first time that an Israeli collection has been included in the registry, which was founded in 1995 and includes 299 items endorsed by the director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Along with other documentation, Yad Vashem has been able to identify by name 4.2 million of the 6 million Jewish Shoah victims.
The repository is housed in the Hall of Names at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The collection was uploaded to the Yad Vashem website as part of the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names and is available in English, Hebrew, Russian, German and Spanish.
“For many Holocaust survivors and their families, Pages of Testimony are the only tangible evidence that their murdered loved ones once lived,” Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said. “The Nazis and their collaborators strove to murder each and every Jewish man, woman and child, and to erase any vestige of their existence. These pages, together with information gathered from around the world as part of our names recovery efforts, restore to them their names, their identities.”
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