New Web Site Helps Locate Holocaust Survivors

JERUSALEM, May 16, 2005 — -- David Sauleman searched worldwide for family members lost since the Holocaust. Recently, his son-in-law logged on to a new Web site set up by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Within seconds, he made a startling discovery.

A testimonial posted to memorialize Sauleman's cousin led to the discovery of five more cousins -- alive and well in Israel.

The son-in-law, Joel Reidenberg, said he was so surprised that he fell back in his chair.

"I was seated close to the computer and I just had to step back," he said. "It was really an overwhelming thing."

More than 50 families have found relatives by searching the Web site since its launch in November, according to the museum. The site has received more than 4 million visitors from more than 180 countries.

The site is a project of the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, which opened in March with the goal of bringing Holocaust remembrance into the 21st century with a new kind of storytelling designed to elicit visitors' empathy and compassion.

The Hall of Names -- which started as a place to reclaim names, identities and memories of people who perished during the Nazi regime --contains more than 2 million pages of testimonials and 600 photographs. There is a separate computer room for visitors where testimonials can be filed and searches of the digitized central database of names can be conducted.

The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names was launched as a Web site last November. The database contains around 3 million names of Holocaust victims -- about half of the 6 million Jews killed. Some 2 million of the names come from the Pages of Testimony filled out by friends and family of those killed, while the other 1 million come from names in museum's archives.

The brains behind the central database, Alexander Avraham, worked more than half his lifetime cross-referencing the names of victims and then digitizing the archive. He dreamed that people would be able to trace relatives and then make connections with survivors.