Yad Vashem marks historic milestone: 5 million Holocaust victims identified
After seven decades of painstaking work, Israel’s Holocaust memorial has recorded over 80% of the known victims, with AI expected to help recover thousands more.
Yad Vashem has announced a historic achievement: the identification and documentation of five million Holocaust victims’ names in its central database, representing over 80% of the estimated six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
This milestone comes after 70 years of dedicated research, documentation, and collaboration with archives, memorial sites, Jewish communities, and survivors worldwide.
The database, accessible online to the public, is the culmination of decades of work. Names were collected through witness testimony pages, historical records such as personal letters, diaries, Nazi files, deportation lists, population censuses, and court documents from trials of Nazi perpetrators and collaborators. Innovative efforts also included examining tombstones in cemeteries and memorial plaques in synagogues. To date, 2.8 million names have been documented through witness pages, a collection recognized by UNESCO’s Memory of the World in 2013.
Experts at Yad Vashem estimate that an additional 250,000 names may be recovered in the coming years using modern tools, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can analyze hundreds of millions of archival documents that previously could not be processed manually. Despite these advances, Yad Vashem notes that hundreds of thousands of victims’ names may never be recorded, as no trace of their existence remains.
“The testimony pages often constitute the only record of a person’s life,” said Dr. Alexander Avraham, Director of Yad Vashem’s Holocaust Victims’ Name Database, who led the project for 37 years. “Most Holocaust victims were murdered without leaving any trace, and the database ensures that their memory is preserved. By identifying one Jewish person after another, we restore their identity and resist the Nazi attempt to erase them from history.”
The database also contains hundreds of thousands of personal files detailing victims’ lives and fates. Over the years, it has helped families worldwide commemorate relatives and, in some cases, confirm their fates. Special algorithms developed by Yad Vashem allow for cross-referencing and merging information, improving both the accuracy and completeness of the records.
Yad Vashem Chairman Danny Dayan called the milestone “an achievement and a reminder of an unfinished commitment,” emphasizing that behind every name is a life lost: “A child who never grew up, a parent who never returned home, a voice silenced forever. Our moral duty is to ensure that every victim is remembered and no one remains anonymous.”
Yad Vashem will mark the milestone with a special seminar on Thursday, November 6, 2025, featuring lectures and panels that reveal the process of collecting names, the stories uncovered along the way, and the latest technological initiatives in victim identification.