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This is YadPOT: An Aid to Creating Pages of Testimony
Pages of Testimony
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is dedicated to commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the Germans and their collaborators, as well as the numerous Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust, so that they will have an eternal remembrance.
Since 1955, Yad Vashem has worked to fulfill its mandate to preserve the memory of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust by collecting their names. One of the central means in accomplishing this task is the Page of Testimony ("POT").
Pages of Testimony are designed to restore the personal identity and brief life stories of each individual victim, which the Nazis and their accomplices tried so hard to obliterate. Submitted by survivors, relatives or friends, Pages of Testimony contain the names, biographical details and, when available, photographs, of the victims. They are preserved in the Hall of Names, in Yad Vashem's Holocaust History Museum complex.
Computerization of the Pages of Testimony collection commenced in 1992,
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and has subsequently evolved into The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, which contains additional names identified from various archival sources. In November 2004, the entire Names Database was uploaded to the Yad Vashem website at www.yadvashem.org where one can freely access information on the over 3 million Jewish victims identified so far, as well as submit additional names and information online. Millions more victims remain unnamed. The effort to identify them continues. The Jewish Genealogist Jewish genealogists are a great and mostly untapped resource for many of these names. The challenge until now has been the time and resources it takes to create a POT. Though creating one page is relatively simple, transcribing hundreds or thousands of pages from genealogical software and paper records has proven to be a barrier to most genealogists. In the Volume 5, Number 22 | December 12, 2004 edition of Nu? What's New?, The E-zine of Jewish Genealogy, editor Gary Mokotoff noted, "Over the years, I have submitted 82 Pages of Testimony, but there are now nearly 300 Holocaust victims on my family tree. A check of the Shoah Victims' Names Database demonstrated that very few of the persons I have not submitted have Pages of Testimony. I have a data entry task to do over the next few months." |
