Until The Last Jew... Until The Last Name

Rozel and Kayla Sarah Scheinfeld

Pictured here are the two daughters of Hananya Scheinfeld.  Written on the back is the following description: “Girls on Paper.” Until recently, Yad Vashem had no more information about the girls - not even their names. The picture was given to Yad Vashem by Hananya’s nephew Joseph Scheinfeld.  Hananya Scheinfeld had passed away, and Joseph did not know the names of the two girls.

Within the last few years, Yad Vashem has digitized millions of Pages of Testimony and developed a sophisticated retrieval system. Pages of Testimony contain basic biographic details of a Holocaust victim and are submitted by family members or friends. As a result of the sophisticated computerized database and retrieval system, it became possible to conduct a search by the name of the submitter of Pages of Testimony. Previously, a search was possible only by name of the victim. Since the names of the girls or their mother was not known, it was not possible to determine if Hananya Scheinfeld had in fact ever submitted a Page of Testimony with the names of his family. With the computerized database, a brief digital search was conducted, and it was discovered that Hananya Scheinfeld had indeed submitted a Page of Testimony in 1956 in memory of his wife and had listed the names of his daughters - Rozel, age 7, and Kayla Sarah, age 6. Both Frida Scheinfeld and her daughters perished in Auschwitz in May 1944. Through the Page of Testimony and modern technology - the family names were redeemed from oblivion.