Yad Vashem says it has identified names of 5 million Holocaust victims

The memorial stated that many of the remaining names of Jewish victims, estimated to be about a million, will likely remain unknown forever.

By Jessica Russak-Hoffman, JNS

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said on Monday that it has “recovered the names of 5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”

“Behind each name is a life that mattered,” stated Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem. “A child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever.”

The memorial stated that many of the remaining names of Jewish victims, estimated to be about a million, will likely remain unknown forever. It added that researchers are analyzing “hundreds of millions of archival documents” with artificial intelligence and machine learning to recover another estimated 250,000 names.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum states that the 1 million figure is based on surviving Nazi records, demographic studies, Jewish records, resistance documents and other archival sources.

Dr. Walter Reich, a psychiatrist and former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, told JNS that “one by one, 6 million Jews were systematically murdered in the Holocaust by the Germans and their helpers—gassed, shot, starved and killed in every way imaginable.”

“To the Germans, these Jews, and all Jews, were an anonymous mass of subhumans who had to be annihilated. But they weren’t anonymous,” added Reich, Yitzhak Rabin memorial professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University.

“Each Jew had a life, a story, family and friends who loved them, a future—and a name,” Reich said. “After 37 years of heroic searching, Yad Vashem has found 5 million of those names.”

“May each of the Jews named, and each of the remaining million Jews whose names have not yet been found and may never be found, be a blessing for us all,” he told JNS, “and a warning to us all, especially at this time when antisemitism, calling not only for the death of the Jews but also the eradication of their state, is exploding throughout the world.”

A January 2025 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that at least 20% of respondents in seven of eight countries studied “believe 2 million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.”

“So many Jews, whose names we thought we’d never know, have been redeemed from having been totally erased by History,” Deborah Lipstadt, a former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, told JNS. “Thanks to the effort by Yad Vashem, they have not been.”

Lipstadt, Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, told JNS she would like to “disabuse anyone who thinks that this might change the minds of those who deny or minimize the Holocaust.”

“Holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism, and Holocaust deniers are antisemites. No evidence, however sound, is going to convince them that they are wrong,” she said. “If they have not been convinced by the reams of evidence documenting the Holocaust, this will not change their minds.”

Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that Yad Vashem’s recovery of the names is “a monumental achievement, because Nazis sought to dehumanize Jews to numbers.”

“Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin reportedly said one death is a tragedy. A million deaths, a statistic. Yad Vashem’s epic commitment to restore the names of our martyrs informs and reinforces memory,” Cooper said.

Cooper told JNS that documenting the names is “a blow to deniers of the Shoah who 80 years later continue to proliferate, but it won’t end Shoah denial for antisemites, who are more comfortable denying there was an Auschwitz, Wannsee Conference or for today’s genociders who deny the Nazi Holocaust and given the opportunity, would fulfill Hitler’s vision of a Judenrein world.”

“The search for more names and historic data on the Shoah especially in areas of the former Soviet Union is sure to continue,” he said. “Let’s also remember that entire families and communities were wiped out without a trace, so this holy work I hope will continue.”