It’s becoming something of a tradition in Israel, on Yom HaShoah in the spring, to gather at someone’s home to share stories about family members who were lost in the Holocaust.
As Dr. Serafima (Sima) Velkovich, an IAJGS board member, points out, most Israelis are acutely aware of their personal ties to the Holocaust. And this new ritual, known as “Remembrance in the Living Room,” is a way to ensure that the victims’ names are never forgotten.
Yet in the diaspora, our family memories are often blurrier. Sima has been struck by how many Jews from America, Canada and elsewhere have told her that they had no personal connection to the Shoah.
Highly unlikely, she says.
“The majority of Ashkenazi Jews have Holocaust connections,” said Sima, who is head of the Family Roots Research Center at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. Many, though, are simply unaware of them, except in the most general sense.
That’s one reason that Yad Vashem recently joined IAJGS as an associate member, she says: To spread the word about how its collections can help Jews today discover the truth about their lost relatives.
“I think it’s very important to know about family, to fill out this gap, to put these people into our family tree,” she said. “To get to know them and to give them life.”
Yad Vashem was created by the Israeli Knesset in 1953 to research and commemorate the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
So far, it has identified 5 million of the 6 million victims by name. It’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names includes, among other things, 2.9 million Pages of Testimony submitted by relatives, friends and descendants, who filled out forms with personal information about the victims they knew or knew about. Now those witness testimonies are all searchable online, and though written in more than 20 languages, English translations are attached.
At the same time, Yad Vashem is actively expanding its role in the world of genealogy. Just last summer, Sima started a Facebook page, “Research Your Jewish Roots with Yad Vashem,” which allows individuals to share stories and photos of the family members they’ve rediscovered through its archives.
I know how powerful these discoveries can be.
Until I began exploring the Victims’ Names database, I had no idea that two of my great-uncles, Fishel Bendit and Shlomo Bendit, lost their lives at Auschwitz. Or that their wives and some of their children were murdered there, too.
I can’t say for sure why my mother never told me, though she must have known—Fishel and Shlomo were her mother’s brothers. But in fairness, I never had the courage to ask.
Now, Yad Vashem is helping us uncover these tragic secrets.
You can search the victims’ database in multiple ways: by surname, by the town or village where they lived, or even by the person who submitted the testimonials (which Yad Vashem has been collecting since the 1950s).
Beyond that, Yad Vashem also houses an online photo archive of Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust, and what it calls “The Righteous Database,” accounts of non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews from the slaughter.
“We also have collections about survivors,” said Sima, but “not all the material is online because of privacy issues.”
Of course, Sima and her colleagues are acutely aware that the identities of about a million Holocaust victims are still unknown some 80 years later, and they haven’t given up trying to find out who they were.
“We can find less and less, of course, but we continue doing this work,” Sima said. “We completely understand we will never arrive to the last name, but we want to do the best that we can.” Even today, individuals can file witness testimony forms if they come across new information about victims.
Someday, she hopes, artificial intelligence and facial recognition software will help identify even more of the missing victims, possibly putting names to the faces in old photos.
It’s not there yet, she said, but “I really hope it will be helpful.”
For more about the witness forms, including how to submit them online, go to Pages of Testimony.
To learn more about Yad Vashem’s archives, or search its online collections, go to yadvashem.org.
