Race against time: Millions still unidentified

Since 1955, Yad Vashem www.yadvashem.org has worked to preserve the memory of six million Jews who perished.

It now needs volunteers to help collect Pages of Testimony to increase the Shoah Victims Database, which currently identifies some 3 million of the Jewish Shoah victims. An international campaign is aimed at recovering as many names of additional Holocaust victims as possible before the generation that remembers best is lost.

International Jewish communities, organizations and Jewish genealogists are being asked to lend their expertise to the historic project, encourage friends and family members to join in and add names to the database.

Yad Vashem believes that by cooperating and spreading the word, many missing names can be recovered. It is also cooperating in research projects to reconstruct pre-war Eastern European Jewish communities.

Volunteers will be working through synagogues, Holocaust centers, Jewish community centers, Jewish student organizations, senior centers, social service agencies, schools, camps, next generation groups, etc. Resource materials are available to assist volunteers; see the Community Outreach Guide, www.yadvashemorg/names/whyCollect.htm

To volunteer, send contact information to names.outreach@yadvashem.org.il (subject heading: Names Volunteer), which will reach outreach manager Cynthia Wroclawski of the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project.