Yad Vashem announced it has identified the names of five million of the more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, the result of seven decades of archival work. About one million victims remain unnamed, but the centre expects AI and machine-learning tools to recover roughly 250,000 more names by analysing hundreds of millions of documents. As the community of survivors dwindles, Yad Vashem says this work is an urgent moral duty to restore identities and prevent victims from being lost to anonymity.
Yad Vashem Identifies Five Million Holocaust Victims — AI Could Recover Hundreds of Thousands More
Yad Vashem announced it has identified the names of five million of the more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, the result of seven decades of archival work. About one million victims remain unnamed, but the centre expects AI and machine-learning tools to recover roughly 250,000 more names by analysing hundreds of millions of documents. As the community of survivors dwindles, Yad Vashem says this work is an urgent moral duty to restore identities and prevent victims from being lost to anonymity.
20:48, 03.11.2025Society
Yad Vashem: five million names recovered; AI to help find many more
JERUSALEM — Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, announced on Monday that the names of five million of the more than six million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust have now been identified. The milestone reflects seven decades of archival work and remains central to the center's mission to restore the identities of those killed by the Nazis during World War II.
Yad Vashem said roughly one million victims still remain unnamed and that many of those are likely to remain unknown forever. However, by applying artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools to hundreds of millions of documents that have been too extensive to examine manually, the centre believes it could recover about 250,000 additional names.
Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan noted the urgency of the work as the number of Holocaust survivors continues to dwindle. He said the milestone underlines an unfinished moral duty to ensure victims are not left in anonymity.
"Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever," Dayan said. "It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity."
In May 2024, Yad Vashem said it had developed AI-powered software to search vast archival holdings to identify hundreds of thousands of Jewish people whose names are missing from formal memorials. At that stage the centre reported it had located information on 4.9 million individuals by processing testimonies and documents and reviewing film footage, cemetery records and other sources; the new announcement raises that total to five million.
Many of the identified names and personal files are compiled in Yad Vashem's online victims' database, available in six languages. The database has helped countless families reconnect with lost relatives and commemorate loved ones who were often left without graves.
"The Nazis aimed not only to murder them, but to erase their existence. By identifying five million names, we are restoring human identities and ensuring that their memory endures," said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names and head of the central victims' database.
The identification effort combines traditional archival research with new digital tools to speed analysis and cross-referencing of massive collections of documents. Yad Vashem emphasized that while technology can recover many names, some victims may never be identified.
Reporting by Steven Scheer; editing by Peter Graff.