The idea came to him last Thursday night. Russel Neiss was talking to a friend and colleague, Rabbi Charlie Schwartz of Cambridge, Mass., about the executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, which President Donald Trump was about to sign (and did sign the next day). 

“It also was coming up on International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” says Neiss, of University City, referring to Friday, Jan. 27. “We wanted to do something as a memorial to the victims of the Shoah.”

So the two put together a computer program that every five minutes tweeted out the name, picture and whatever-known details of the 937 passengers aboard the German transatlantic liner MS St. Louis. Most of the passengers were Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939. The ship was denied entry to Cuba and the United States; as a result, it had to turn back to Europe, where more than quarter of the passengers wound up dying in Nazi death camps.

Neiss explained that the source information came from public records at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The museum did all the heavy lifting,” Neiss explained. “We wrote a computer script that did all the copying and pasting and put it in a single document. From there, we set it out on Twitter in a program that tweeted out one entry at a time, every five minutes.”

Starting at midnight on Jan. 27, the Twitter account @Stl_Manifest  tweeted the name and fate of those who died, for 21 consecutive hours. Although Neiss wasn’t sure what the response would be, he said he could never have imagined how overwhelming it has become.

“It went from one follower to 50,000 followers by the time the tweets stopped,” said Neiss, who is married to Rori Picker Neiss, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “Now we’re up to 70,000 followers.”

In addition, Neiss has been fielding calls from reporters all over the country, including The Atlantic, CNN, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” and the Daily Beast. “I missed the call from the Washington Post because it came on Shabbat,” said Neiss, who is Orthodox and attends Congregation Bais Abraham. “On my way to trivia night at (Saul) Mirowitz (Jewish Community School) Saturday night, a Norwegian reporter called and told me that a story on our tweets was the second most popular piece the next day.”

Neiss, who works as a software engineer and Jewish educator, said the executive order came out halfway through the 21 hours of tweets. “We primarily did this project for Holocaust Remembrance Day but it is impossible to ignore the political realities we find ourselves in.”

Neiss added that the “most powerful” response to the tweets came in a video from a diverse group in Los Angeles reading the names and profiles out loud for roughly 30 minutes as they protested Trump’s executive order on immigration restrictions.