Yad Vashem announced it would be inaugurating a new installation entitled “The Book of Names” in UN headquarters on 26 January 2023 for 2023 International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. This exhibition is being installed at the United Nations Headquarters as part of the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Program on the Holocaust activities for International Holocaust Remembrance Day which is 27 January 2023..

“The Book of Names will be on display in the UN Headquarters in New York through 17 February 2023. At the conclusion of its display at the United Nations, The Book of Names installation will be brought to Israel to be permanently included in Yad Vashem's Museum's Complex on the Mount of Remembrance, and will open to public viewing in time for Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed this year on 17-18 April 2023.”

“This monumental installation features the alphabetically arranged names of 4,800,000 Holocaust victims currently documented and included in Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. The total length of The Book of Names is 26.45 feet (8 meters). It stands 6.56 feet (2 meters) high, and is 3.3 feet (one meter) wide. A strip of light runs the length of the inside of The Book of Names, illuminating the memory of the Jewish men, women children murdered during the Holocaust for all to remember. At the end of the Book of Names there are blank pages symbolizing more than one million identities yet recovered from the nameless murdered.”

“There will be a video clip about the importance of remembering names of Holocaust victims and the rationale behind the Names Recovery Project, as well as an explanatory panel with information about the Holocaust – the anti-Jewish campaign initiated and implemented by Nazi Germany during the years 1933-1945 that culminated in the unprecedented and systematic genocide that aimed to totally eradicate Judaism and annihilate the Jewish people.”

“Whenever possible, the listings in The Book of Names also contain the birth dates, home towns, and circumstances and places of death of the respective victims. The names in the exhibit are taken from many sources, including Pages of Testimony collected by Yad Vashem, as well as various lists compiled during and following the Shoah, meticulously gathered over the past seven decades and carefully reviewed by Yad Vashem experts. In June 2013, The Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony Memorial Repository were included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.”

The installation is an updated version of the Yad Vashem Book of Names that has been on permanent display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland since 2017. The new version, which contains 500,000 additional names, stands 6.5 feet high and approximately 3.3 feet wide. Its total length is 26.5 feet. The massive volume lists the names of the victims in alphabetical order and, where the information is known, includes their birth dates, hometowns and places of death…”

To read more see: https://www.yadvashem.org/press-release/19-january-2023-10-35.html ; and

https://www.jta.org/2023/01/23/global/holocaust-book-of-names-to-be-inaugurated-at-the-un-underscores-the-individual-identities-of-the-6-million

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee