Yad Vashem today is in a situation similar to that of 19th-century England—having started the Industrial Revolution, its machines became outdated before those of other countries who had started their industrial development later. Yad Vashem’s database, online since 2004, was state of the art when it appeared, and extensive resources were invested to make it as user friendly as possible. Yad Vashem was one of the first repositories worldwide to make a significant part of its collection open to the public free of charge. Today, six years later, our online database is an antique.
For that reason, this article begins with a focus on the future and the various improvements that Yad Vashem plans for the database in the next few years. Currently, the most problematical aspect is the technical side, so the first planned efforts will be of that nature.
The Future
Yad Vashem plans to completely change the database’s platform within the next year or two in order to assure a more stable and robust system. The new platform will permit Yad Vashem to update the online database more frequently than the current two or three times a year. After that, within two to three years, a virtual file will be created for each individual in the database. Work already is underway on strategies to combine the different records in the database on a single individual into one integrated record. Because of differences in the information existing in the various records, from different spellings of names to divergence in dates and places, this is a difficult task.
Further down the road—two to five years from now—Yad Vashem will add names to the online database of individuals not defined as killed or murdered. Currently, its internal (not online) database includes 250,000 records of survivors and 750,000 records of victims whose fate is unclear, plus refugees, evacuees, and people registered on pre-war lists of Jewish communities. These numbers are growing every day. Yad Vashem hopes to solve the problems inherent in posting these names online (including issues of privacy of survivors) in the next few years and add them to the online database.
Three to seven years from now Yad Vashem intends to add names from the International Tracing Service (ITS) collection to the online database. Currently, Yad Vashem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and ITS have an agreement to enter more extensive data on many individuals in the ITS collection into a database that each institution will be able to import into its internal system. The current international agreement on this material does not permit that information to be posted online, but Yad Vashem hopes that a future agreement can be forged that will allow it to integrate at least a subset of this material into its central database.
Yad Vashem continues to receive about 4,000 new Pages of Testimony per month, and it continues to enter into the database tens of thousands of new records monthly from Pages of Testimony, archival records, and other sources.
Recent Changes
When the Yad Vashem database went online in 2004, it included Pages of Testimony and some additional records, but the vast majority of records were from Pages of Testimony. Since then, as information from other sources has increased, the ratio of Pages of Testimony in the database has decreased; currently the Pages of Testimony represent about 43 percent of the records in the database. While the Pages of Testimony still represent the largest collection in the database, the common view of the Central Database as a “Pages of Testimony database” is no longer valid.
In the 1950s, submitters of Pages of Testimony were asked to note any children on the parents’ pages. Recently, Yad Vashem has created a separate record for every child mentioned on the Pages of Testimony, and, while the record will be separate, the multimedia of the document which appears as a source for the information will continue to be the parent’s Page of Testimony. In addition, for the past few years, Yad Vashem has collected names written in religious books, on the walls of synagogues, and on the gravestones of survivors (where, frequently, the names of their families who died in the Holocaust are noted). The names of 300,000 thousand victims have been collected this way. Entering this data into the Central Database is labor intensive. The first 17,000 are now in the online database. In the future, Yad Vashem will add to each record a digital photograph of the source from which it was taken.
Important Additions Unknown to Many
The CHGK (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия) was the State Extraordinary Commission established by the Soviet Union to investigate atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Its representatives operated in locations all over the Soviet Union that had been occupied by the Nazis. The reports prepared in each place the commission investigated describe the Nazi atrocities in detail. The commission reached every town and village, interviewed residents and received information on what happened during the war years. The CHGK ceased its activities in 1946. Their files currently are held in the Government Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), and were closed to the public until 1989, when Yad Vashem began to acquire CHGK material. CHGK material includes all areas that were defined as part of the USSR after World War II. Currently, more than one million CHGK records are in the Yad Vashem Central Database. In most cases, a scan of the original document is attached to the record.
Currently, more than 320,000 thousand records from yizkor books are in the database, with thousands more added every month.
Other Aspects of the Yad Vashem Website
Useful to Genealogists
Yad Vashem’s photo archive is online and one of its features is a link to Google maps, so that when a record is linked to a location, its placement on a map is shown and, in most cases, information about the size of the Jewish community there. In the future, this feature will be added to the Names database.
Thorough researchers should check also the online multimedia encyclopedia about the Holocaust prepared by the Holocaust Resource Center as well as the site about the Righteous Among the Nations. An extensive new area on this site has both information about the program and a growing archive of stories of the Righteous.
Note also that “The Untold Stories—the murder sites of the Jews in the occupied territories of the former USSR” is an area in the Yad Vashem website that includes extensive information on these murder sites, including historical information, testimonies, and lists of names. Finally, genealogists should not overlook the dozens of video testimonies in various exhibitions. In the “quick links” at the top of the home page, click on “Video Testimony Resource Center.” A page appears on which all the testimonies are accessible by town of birth of the survivor or by subject.
Zvi Bernhardt has worked at Yad Vashem since 1994. He currently is deputy director of two related departments, the Hall of Names and Reference and Information Services which serves the public online and in the Yad Vashem reading room with information about the collections of the library, archives, and Hall of Names. Bernhdardt has played a central role in projects to enter names from yizkor (memorial) books in the central database and projects to collect names from synagogues, holy books, and other religious sources. In addition, he has served as liaison to JewishGen and other genealogical organizations.