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Yad Vashem
has updated its technical resources, and inquiries about Holocaust
victims may now be made
online. The vast archival materials
amassed over the years at Yad Vashem, including a portion of the
scanned
International Tracing Service (ITS)
materials recently transferred to Yad Vashem, will be accessed to
respond to these queries. Our reference staff, recently bolstered to
attend to the expected influx in inquiries, will respond individually
to each request, but please allow several weeks for an answer.
Meanwhile, because the documents received from the ITS are not in an
online searchable format, Yad Vashem’s technical staff is working
diligently to make them accessible via our reference staff. In
parallel, Yad Vashem is investing immense efforts to integrate the ITS
materials into its computer systems in order to eventually make them
available to the public in a user-friendly manner.
With 75
million pages of documentation, as well as photographs, testimonies,
Pages of Testimony and more, Yad Vashem’s Archives comprise the
largest collection of information on the Holocaust. In the mid-1950s
Yad Vashem microfilmed large portions of the International Tracing
Service (ITS) records, incorporating those documents into its
Archives. An amendment to the ITS treaty by its International
Commission in November 2007, has allowed Israel, represented by Yad
Vashem, to obtain scanned copies of the entire ITS collection. While
much of the first portion of this information, received in August
2007, duplicates the documents received decades ago, the copies
received by Yad Vashem comprise additional material collected by the
ITS over the last 50 years, as well as documents never received by Yad
Vashem. The receipt of the scanned ITS materials is an ongoing project
with additional materials to be transferred to Yad Vashem over the
course of the next two years.
Decades of Experience
Yad Vashem’s Reference and Information staff has amassed unprecedented
technical and research skills over the last 50 years. This experience,
in addition to the vast body of resources at its disposal, allows Yad
Vashem to respond to the 25,000 yearly inquiries it receives every
year.
Information
requests may be sent via mail or fax (+972-2-644-3669), using a
downloadable form, or an
online
form. To learn more about submitting a request
click here. For more information,
facts and history about ITS, Yad Vashem and the documents in the
Archives, please visit our
ITS fact sheet. As always, our
research staff considers these requests an important priority and new
queries will be answered in a timely manner. The public is welcome to
visit Yad Vashem and search our entire collection of archival
material. Our reading room is open 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Sunday –
Thursday.
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