31 July 2006
Some 11,650 archival lists, indexed from about 1 million pages of documentation, were uploaded to Yad Vashem’s website, www.yadvashem.org today. The Shoah Related Lists Database includes records compiled by Red Army investigators that were later stored in archives in the former Soviet Union. Recently brought to Yad Vashem, they are now being made accessible to the public. The Database also includes deportation lists, lists prepared by Jews during the Holocaust, registers compiled by survivors at liberation, and records prepared by various municipalities under Nazi rule. The lists are in twenty languages and are estimated to contain some 5 million name entries. They have been catalogued in a unified format, and may be searched in English.
Most of the lists in the Database are to be found in the Yad Vashem Archives and some 10% are located in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The USHMM is also uploading the lists database, while on Yad Vashem’s website, one is also able to see scanned images of most of the lists. (Note: Due to the multilingual and often handwritten appearance of the lists, it is not possible at this stage to perform a computerized search within the lists themselves.)
“This is a revolution in public access to information,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate. “An integrated search of this new Shoah Related Lists Database and the Central Database of Shoah Victims Names, which Yad Vashem uploaded to its website last year, can now shed further light on the fate of individual people during the Shoah. Yad Vashem is investing a great deal of resources to bring the information located in our Archives to homes around the world.”
Yad Vashem is especially grateful to the employees of Netvision Ltd. (Haifa) for their cooperation in this vital project, even while under threat of missile attacks emanating from southern Lebanon.
The program of identifying, cataloguing, and uploading information about Holocaust-related lists is supported by the Victim List Project of the Swiss Banks Settlement under the supervision of the Honorable Chief Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court, whose goal is to make available to the public the names of all those killed or targeted by the Nazis. The scanning of the lists is part of the process of digitization of the Yad Vashem Archives, supported by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference).
