From Reuters:
“Names of 5 million of 6
million Jews killed in Holocaust now identified”
Five million of the more than six
million Jews killed in the Holocaust have now been identified, and with the
further help of artificial intelligence (AI), even more names could be
recovered, Israeli researchers said on Monday. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust
Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said the milestone marks seven decades of work
and is at the heart of its mission to recover the identities of those murdered
by the Nazis during World War Two.
Some one million Jewish victims
are still unknown "and many will likely remain so forever," Yad
Vashem said. But with tools such as AI and machine learning, it believes it
could recover another 250,000 names by analysing hundreds of millions of
documents that have been too extensive to research manually.
With the number of Holocaust
survivors shrinking and the world soon to be without first-hand witnesses, Yad
Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said reaching the five million milestone was a
reminder of an unfinished obligation. "Behind each name is a life that
mattered - a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice
that was silenced forever," Dayan said. "It is our moral duty to
ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in
the darkness of anonymity."
In May 2024, Yad Vashem had said
it had developed its own AI-powered software to comb through piles of records
to try to identify hundreds of thousands of Jewish people killed in the
Holocaust whose names are missing from official memorials.
At the time, it had tracked down
information on 4.9 million individuals by reading through statements and
documents, checking film footage, cemeteries and other records. The names of
Holocaust victims, as well as personal files that tell about the lives of many
of them, are compiled in an online Yad Vashem database in six languages. This
database, it noted, has helped countless families reunite with lost relatives
and families to commemorate loved ones, particularly as most victims were left
without graves. "The Nazis aimed not only to murder them, but to erase
their existence. And by identifying five million names, we are restoring their
human identities and ensuring that their memory endures," said Alexander
Avram, director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names, who heads the central database
of victims' names.
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