Shalom,

On the eve of Holocaust Martyrs’ & Heroes’ Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah (April 21st 2008), I would like to update you on the global efforts of the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project to commemorate each individual Shoah victim by recording their names for posterity in Yad Vashem’s Central Database for Shoah Victims’ Names.

Yad Vashem’s central theme for Yom Hashoah this year is “Children in the Holocaust”. Click here to read an article highlighting this theme or visit Yad Vashem's Yom Hashoah mini-site including online exhibits and educational resources.
Visit, “Children in the Ghetto” an interactive website that portrays life during the Holocaust from the viewpoint of children who lived in the ghetto, while attempting to make the complex experience of ghetto life as accessible as possible to today’s children.

I would like to invite all active names recovery volunteers - whether you are an individual who took this project on independently or someone working within the framework of a larger organization - to take part in a conference call to discuss the best work practices, anecdotes, heart-warming experiences and frustrations you have encountered while implementing the Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project.

Following are scheduled dates and times for the phone calls:

Tuesday May 19th 2009
Times: New York 9:30 am, Zurich 3:30 pm, London 2:30 pm, Jerusalem 4:30 pm

Tuesday May 26th 2009
Times: Los Angeles 9:30 am, New York 12:30 noon, London 5:30 pm, Jerusalem 7:30 pm

Please contact us to REGISTER in advance and confirm your participation in the calls.
Please send us your name and phone number along with specific questions
or topics you would like addressed.

" The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names has been enlarged and now contains close to 3.6 million names of Holocaust victims, all of which are accessible online.

" The Names Database now contains over 2.15 million Pages of Testimony, about two-thirds of the total number of names in the Database. Tens of thousands of Pages of Testimony were gathered as a result of intensive activity of the Names Recovery campaign in the Russian-speaking sector.

" Over 600,000 name occurrences of victims and survivors from archival lists and other documentation were digitized, among them archival documents gathered in Hungary, the former Soviet Union and other areas.

"Unto Every Person There is a Name", a worldwide Holocaust memorial project is now marking its 20th consecutive year. The project is aimed at perpetuating the memory of Shoah victims through public recitation of their names on Yom Hashoah. Click here for lists of Shoah victims’ names for recitation ceremonies or to read the names in this short video and accompanying text, which provides brief biographical information about the victims.

Watch this video interview with Boris Maftsir, Manager of the Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project in the Nazi Occupied Territories of the Former Soviet Union, as he outlines the intensive efforts to recover the names of Shoah victims in the Ukraine in the hope of restoring the personal identities of each victim that our enemies sought to erase.

Yad Vashem recently launched a comprehensive new website in Spanish, accessible at www.yadvashem.org, containing extensive resources on the Holocaust, as well as a multimedia exhibit of The Auschwitz Album and material on Righteous Among the Nations, and a variety of educational materials in Spanish including lesson plans, ideas for working with testimonies and two online courses: “Ghettos” and “The Final Solution.”

With warmest regards from Jerusalem,

Cynthia Wroclawski, Manager
The Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project
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