Yad Vashem says it has identified five million Holocaust victims: ‘Behind each name is a life that mattered’

JTA – Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to uncover the identities of all of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, crossing the five-million name threshold with the help of artificial intelligence.

That leaves one million names still unknown from the tally of six million murdered Jews that is synonymous with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

Two years ago, Yad Vashem inaugurated a 26.5 foot-long (8m) “Book of Names,” which included the names of 4.8 million victims of the Shoah, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Since then, researchers deployed AI technology and machine learning to analyse hundreds of millions of archival documents that were previously too extensive to research manually, according to Yad Vashem. In addition to covering large amounts of material quickly, the algorithms were taught to look out for variations of victims’ names, leading to the new identification of hundreds of thousands of victims.

Yad Vashem estimates an additional 250 000 names could still be recovered using the technology.

“Reaching five million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Dani Dayan, chairperson of Yad Vashem. “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. It’s our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”