JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony Memorial Repository has been included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Pages of Testimony are specially designed forms filled out in memory of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, which have been collected by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, since 1954.
Some 2.6 million names have been documented on Pages of Testimony, which together with other documentation have allowed Yad Vashem to identify by name 4.2 million out of the 6 million victims.

The Pages of Testimony Memorial Repository is housed in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The entire collection has been uploaded to the Yad Vashem website as part of the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names and is available in English, Hebrew, Russian, German and Spanish.

“For many Holocaust survivors and their families, Pages of Testimony are the only tangible evidence that their murdered loved ones once lived,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem. “The Nazis and their collaborators strove to murder each and every Jewish man, woman and child and to erase any vestige of their existence. These pages, together with information gathered from around the world as part of our names recovery efforts, restore to them their names – their identities.”

The Memory of the World Program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded in order to preserve the world’s documentary heritage, recognizing that war and social upheaval, as well as lack of resources, harmed significant documentary treasures throughout the world. The Memory of the World Register, founded in 1995, includes so far 299 items worldwide endorsed by the director-general of UNESCO.

This is the first time that an Israeli collection has been included in the registry.