Holocaust Database Launches on Internet

The Israeli Holocaust memorial foundation Yad Vashem on Monday launched a central database with the names of around three million Jewish victims on the Internet. The online database will be accessible free of charge via a link on Yed Vashem's Web site, www.yadvashem.org, and will be the largest database of its kind in the world, the chairman of Yad Vashem's directorate, Avner Shalev, said. Two-thirds of the names were compiled from personal testimonies filed by survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims since 1955. An additional 1 million names were taken from deportation and census lists in Yad Vashem's archives. "This is a race against time; we must redeem as many names as possible before the generation that remembers them is no longer with us," Shalev said.