(Jewish Group) Jewish museums team up to create new tool for researching Holocaust victims
n a boon for scholars and amateur researchers, records from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust authority, are now publicly available through JewishGen, the largest online Jewish genealogy resource of its kind.
The agreement announced Tuesday by Yad Vashem and New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage/A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, an affiliate of JewishGen, provides easy access to millions of names commemorated in Yad Vashem’s database.
“Pages of Testimony,” documents collected by Yad Vashem since the 1950s, include the names, biographical details and, when possible, photographs of some 2,700,000 men, women and children killed in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem’s Names Database commemorates over 4,800,000 Jewish victims in total. Researchers will now be able to retrieve these records through a direct search within JewishGen.
“Yad Vashem’s Pages of Testimony might contain the only information about someone who was murdered in the Shoah, yet researchers might not know to look on their website,” JewishGen Executive Director Avraham Groll told the New York Jewish Week. Under the new agreement, the Yad Vashem search results will automatically appear within JewishGen.
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