Highlights of Yad Vashem’s Activities in 2018

Holocaust Education – The International School for Holocaust Studies

Youth Movements' Ceremony in the Valley of the Communities

More than 349,000 students from Israel and abroad, soldiers and officers of the IDF and other Israeli security forces participated in seminars and programs of the International School for Holocaust Studies and at the School’s branch in Givatayim.
Some 19,950 educators attended 1,268 day-seminars held throughout the country for teachers and education students in Israel. Among the participants were more than 3,400 ultra-Orthodox educators.
83 training days were conducted for some 2,300 Israeli educators. 22 were for more than 500 ultra-Orthodox educators.
Some 350 educators from 50 countries participated in the Tenth International Conference for Holocaust Educators.
78 long-term seminars were conducted for more than 1,800 educators from abroad and 55 short seminars were held for more than 1,300 overseas participants.
Some 1,100 teachers participated in 3 conferences held for ultra-Orthodox educators.
School staff members, together with Yad Vashem seminar graduates around the world, participated in seminars, conferences and international forums, and conducted educational activities for some 20,600 participants in 36 different countries worldwide.
More than 10,000 teachers across the US received training as part of “Echoes and Reflections,” a professional development program created by Yad Vashem, the ADL and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Some 60,000 educators and community leaders have been trained since the inception of the program.
More than 48,800 individuals participated in various online courses produced by the International School, most of them in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), entitled: "The Holocaust: An Introduction."
Over 1 million views were registered on YouTube of the films comprising the Holocaust Education Video Toolbox, a special educational platform developed by the International School for Holocaust Studies. More than 2.4 million views have been recorded since the platform was uploaded in 2013.

Research and Publications

The International Institute for Holocaust Research granted the annual Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in Memory of Benny and Tilly Joffe z”l to two recipients this year: Dr. Daniel Reiser of the Herzog College and Safed Academic College for Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira: Sermons from the Years of Rage; and Dr. Ion Popa of the University of Manchester for The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust.
The International Institute for Holocaust Research held 2 international conferences, 8 international research workshops and 14 seminars for Holocaust scholars. The Institute also held the annual lecture of The John Najmann Chair for Holocaust Studies; and the annual event in memory of Prof. David Bankier, which included a central lecture open to the public and a doctoral workshop. In addition, the Institute held an international conference in cooperation with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and hosted a workshop for doctoral students and research fellows of the Claims Conference.
9 senior researchers from Israel and abroad were hosted at Yad Vashem; 12 research fellows conducted research under the auspices of the EHRI program; and 5 senior researchers were hosted as scholars-in-residence.
The Institute granted 16 awards to Master's and Doctoral students studying in Israel, and 4 awards to Doctoral students who came to Yad Vashem from abroad; 4 additional scholarships were awarded by the Institute's Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.
30 new publications were released by Yad Vashem, including 13 research studies, 3 memoirs, 10 diaries and 4 volumes of Yad Vashem Studies.

Artworks and Artifacts

100,000 people visited the new exhibition "Flashes of Memory: Photography during the Holocaust", which opened in the Exhibitions Pavilion in January 2018.
The new exhibition "They Say There is a Land: Longings for Eretz Israel during the Holocaust" opened in the Auditorium Exhibitions Hall. 10,000 people visited the new exhibition since it went on display in May 2018.
830 artifacts and 380 works of art were added to Yad Vashem’s collections. The Artifacts Collection now holds 32,500 items and the Art Collection comprises 12,000 pieces.
250 traveling exhibitions in various languages were shown in 31 countries worldwide.

Righteous Among the Nations

Avner Shalev presented Gioia Bartali with a certificate of Commemorative Citizenship of the State of Israel for her late grandfather, Gino Bartali

387 individuals were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. At the end of 2018, over 27,360 individuals had been awarded the title.

Visits and Commemorative Events

The Holocaust History Museum

1,010,000 people visited Yad Vashem in 2018.
40 percent of Yad Vashem's visitors were guided by its professional guiding staff, among them more than 850 tours for world leaders, dignitaries and official visitors.
440 tours were conducted for over 830 Bnei Mitzvah.
More than 85 events were held in conjunction with Holocaust survivor and next-generation organizations, including the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies.
More than 215 memorial services were conducted.
1,900 general public inquiries were answered.

Internet Activity

5 million visits from some 220 countries and territories were recorded on the Yad Vashem website.
More than 24 million video views were recorded on Yad Vashem's YouTube channels in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish since their launch.
Over 12,000 individuals new followers joined Yad Vashem's Facebook page. The total number of followers is over 174,000.
More than 17,000 new followers joined Yad Vashem's Twitter accounts. Currently, more than 51,400 individuals follow Yad Vashem on Twitter in English, French, German, Russian and Spanish.
More than 10,000 individuals joined Yad Vashem's Instagram account. The total number of followers now stands at over 27,000.

Documentation, Photographs, Testimonies, Names, Books and Films

Conservation of an original Holocaust-era document

6 million pages of Holocaust-era documentation were gathered by Yad Vashem. To date, Yad Vashem’s Archives, the largest and most comprehensive repository of its kind, contain some 210 million pages of documentation.
450,000 pages of documentation were digitized.
Yad Vashem has identified more than three-quartersof the victims of the Holocaust. The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names now contains close to 4,800,000 names of Holocaust victims, all of which are accessible online. The source of more than half the total number of names in the Names Database is from over 2.7 million Pages of Testimony, while the remainder is from archival lists and documents.
The Shoah Victims' Names Recovery Project gathered 55,700 names, 15,000 from Pages of Testimony.
Staff of the "Gathering the Fragments" campaign to rescue personal items from the Holocaust era collected some 22,000 items – documents, diaries, photographs, artifacts and artworks – from more than 1,000 individuals in 14 centralized collection days and 206 home collections. Since the project was launched in April 2011, more than 260,000 items have been received from more than 11,800 individuals.
10,000 photographs were added to the Archives. Yad Vashem currently houses 500,000photographs, including 170,000 photographs attached to Pages of Testimony and housed in the Hall of Names.
More than 1,200 new Holocaust survivor testimonies were filmed and recorded, aided by an outreach program enabling survivors to have their testimonies filmed at home. The Archives currently house 131,000 video, audio and written testimonies.
24,000 public inquiries for archival information were answered. Of these inquiries, 6,000 members of the public were assisted in the Library and Archives Reading Room, and 18,000 were written queries.
Yad Vashem's Library, the world's most comprehensive collection of published material about the Holocaust, now holds over 170,000 titles in 60 languages.
650 films, including classics from the past as well as new films, were added to Yad Vashem's Visual Center Film Library, and more than 800 from a variety of genres were catalogued. The searchable online film catalogue of the Visual Center now includes more than 11,970 titles, all of them easily accessible on Yad Vashem's website. Currently over 8,800 films are available for viewing at the Center.
Among the thousands of visitors to the Visual Center, more than 70 groups of students, teachers and filmmakers took part in Holocaust-related film programs and lectures, and over 900 public inquiries for research and information regarding the Holocaust and cinema were answered.
4,260 individuals attended screenings accompanied by a short lecture as part of the second season of Yad Vashem's Film Club in Jerusalem, Givatayim and Haifa.
More than 30 special lectures and screenings of films for the general public were held at commemorative events and film festivals in Israel and around the world.
The 13^th annual Avner Shalev Yad Vashem Chairman’s Award was awarded to Israeli director Uri Barbash for his film Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutskever. The annual award is presented for artistic achievement in a Holocaust-related film.