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ITS Archives Now Available

The recent opening of the International Tracing Service (ITS) Archives at Bad Arolsen in Germany will potentially make millions of records and images of historical documents available to the wider public. A digital copy of part of the archive, containing over 12 million documents, was handed over to Yad Vashem, and work has already begun to make that information readily accessible to survivors and their families. Yad Vashem expects to receive the entire ITS archive by the end of 2010.

With over half a century’s experience working with ITS documents, a portion of which were microfilmed by a team of experts at Yad Vashem in the 1950s and stored in its archives, Yad Vashem is using its expertise to make the information in the digitized documents available in the most efficient way possible. Until now, Yad Vashem has been the only additional repository of these documents, other than the ITS Archives. Yad Vashem has continually made available the documents purchased in the 1950s, a part of the more than 75 million pages of documentation located in its Archives. The research and technical skills that Yad Vashem has amassed answering over 25,000 annual requests places Yad Vashem in a unique position to access and assess the documents in a professional and expert fashion. Yad Vashem is already bolstering its staff to attend to the influx of queries expected to be generated with the arrival of the ITS Archive, and new technological tools are being employed to enable trained researchers to expertly search through the additional resources of information now available.

Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery and ITS

Yad Vashem continues its mission to memorialize each individual Jew who perished in the Holocaust by recording their names, biographical details and photographs on Pages of Testimony. To date more than 3.3 million names are digitized and documented in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, but millions more remain unknown. Archival experts are working to glean additional victims’ names from the wealth of information contained in the ITS documents recently received by Yad Vashem.

While the addition of the ITS information to Yad Vashem’s archives will create an unrivaled Holocaust repository, many victims who were never listed in any archival source will still remain unnamed, unless those who remember them submit Pages of Testimony on their behalf. Yad Vashem therefore continues to call for the submission of these unique personal testimonies, which serve as an invaluable resource for commemorating and restoring the individual identities of the victims of the Holocaust.

Pages of Testimony are available online, in a variety of languages. 

Jerry Seinfeld Visits Yad Vashem

In a brief trip to Israel last month to promote his new film, comedian Jerry Seinfeld made time in his busy schedule for a visit to Yad Vashem. Coming to Israel for the first time since he volunteered on a Kibbutz in 1970, Seinfeld met with the Prime Minster and President of Israel, stopped at selected tourist sites including the Western Wall, and visited Yad Vashem, on the Mount of Remembrance. Originally planned as a brief visit, Seinfeld extended his tour of the Yad Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum, the Visual Center and the Children’s Memorial, spending close to two hours at the site.

During October, The International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, together with the United Nations Department of Public Information’s Holocaust Outreach Program, provided a weeklong training seminar to UN Information Officers from around the world. Hailing from locations as diverse as Ankara, Kiev, Bucharest and Tokyo, the participants participated in seminars examining the historical circumstances leading up to the Holocaust, as well as forums addressing the individual and collective responsibility for preventing future genocides. As a result of the successful seminar, follow-up projects with many of the participants are already underway. Yad Vashem and the UN Department of Information, together with other international partners, have also collaborated on developing an exceptional database of Internet-based resources.

Echoes and Reflections, a multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust, developed jointly by Yad Vashem, the ADL and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education for teaching the Holocaust, was recently honored with the National Association for Multicultural Education Media (NAME) Award for 2007. The NAME award recognizes the integration of visual testimonies of survivors and witnesses with primary source documents and brings special attention to the Echoes and Reflections website, which has been developed as an integral part of the Echoes and Reflections available resources. Through its historical prism, the interdisciplinary curriculum comprehensively addresses Holocaust education while also tackling contemporary issues of antisemitism, racial hatred and prejudice.

 

With Your Support...

The American Society for Yad Vashem held its Annual Tribute Dinner on November 18, 2007 in New York City. The dinner honored survivors Edward and Cecile Mosberg with the Yad Vashem Remembrance Award and Matthew Bronfman with the Yad Vashem Young Leadership Remembrance Award. For more information on the Dinner please click here.

Yad Vashem welcomes the ongoing partnership and visits from its friends and supporters:

For more information on Friends of Yad Vashem please click here

Yad Vashem Quarterly Magazine

Vashem Magazine (Issue 47) is now available online. Featuring articles on recent educational seminars, news about future events (including an upcoming special exhibition about the contribution of Holocaust survivors to the State of Israel), new initiatives in Names Recovery, and an article about German students who come to Israel and volunteer at Yad Vashem, a tremendous wealth of information is contained in this latest issue. Also highlighted: the illustrated Bible of Carol Deutsch, a beautiful artifact left as a living legacy for a toddler daughter by her loving father who was murdered in the Holocaust. The illustrations are on display at the Yad Vashem Museum of Holocaust Art and are currently being reproduced in a unique portfolio format. Read more here.

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