Names Recovery Month Launched in Advance of Holocaust Remembrance Day

Nissan 5767, (March-April 2007) has been designated Names Recovery Month by Yad Vashem. The month, including both Passover and Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 Nissan/April 16), will be marked by local community campaigns to recover names of Holocaust victims. Thousands of Jewish communities will engage in this historical grassroots initiative. 

Concurrent to Names Recovery Month, Boris Maftzir, Manager, Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project in the FSU, will be in the United States in March, to launch a special campaign in Russian speaking communities throughout the U.S.

Names Recovery Month is part of the overall 11th hour campaign calling upon people to memorialize Jews murdered in the Holocaust by recording their names, and when available, photos and other biographical data on Pages of Testimony. It has taken upwards of five decades to document over 3.1 million names currently listed in the online Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.

"Millions more names may be lost forever. Jewish communities play a key role by actively reaching out to the generation that best remembers before it is too late."

Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem

Thousands of posters and tens of thousands of Pages of Testimony are being distributed to synagogues, Holocaust centers, Jewish community centers, agencies, federations and schools globally in preparation for Names Recovery Month. Communities are enlisting volunteers to assist survivors and their families to complete Pages of Testimony in memory of Shoah victims.

Since the Names Database went online in November 2004, there have been over 11 million visitors, from 215 countries. Some 465,000 names and biographical details and nearly 5,000 photos have been added to the Database, available in English, Hebrew and Russian.