Five Million Jewish Holocaust Victims Successfully Identified

Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. (Wikimedia Commons/zeev stein PIkwiki Israel)

JAKARTA - Five million of the more than six million Jews killed in the Holocaust have now been identified, and with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), more names could be found, Israeli researchers said on Monday.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said this achievement marked seven decades of hard work and was at the heart of its mission to find the identities of those killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.

About one million Jewish victims are still unknown "and many are likely to remain so forever," said Yad Vashem. However, with devices like AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning, Yad Vashem is confident he can find another 250,000 names by analyzing hundreds of millions of documents that are too extensive to study manually.

With the number of Holocaust survivors shrinking and the world about to soon lose eye witnesses, Yad Vashem's Head, Dani Dayan, said the five million achievement was a reminder of an unfinished obligation.

"Behind every name there is a meaningful life - a child who never grows up, a parent who never comes home, a voice that has been silenced forever," Dayan said.

"It is our moral obligation to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one is left behind in the darkness of anonymity," he said.

In May 2024, Yad Vashem said it had developed AI-based software to comb through piles of records to identify hundreds of thousands of Jews who died in the Holocaust whose names were missing from the official monument.

At the time, Yad Vashem had tracked information about 4.9 million people by reading statements and documents, checking film recordings, funerals, and other records.

The names of Holocaust victims, as well as personal files that tell the lives of many of them, are compiled in the Yad Vashem online database in six languages.

This database, as noted, has helped many families reunite with relatives and families who have passed away in memory of loved ones, especially as most victims do not have graves.

"Nazis are not only aiming to kill them, but also to erase their whereabouts. And by identifying five million names, we restore their humanitarian identities and ensure their memories remain sustainable," said Alexander Avram, director of the Yad Vashem Hall, who heads the database of the names of the victims.