1,800 new Pages of Testimony to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem

Looking for traces all over the world – The Support Association and the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe present 1,800 new Pages of Testimony to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.

The Foundation succeeded in preparing a great collection of Pages of Testimony of unknown victims of the Holocaust for this year’s charity dinner of the Support Association at the Kempinski Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Lea Rosh, chairwoman of the Association, and Uwe Neumärker, Director of the Foundation, presented nearly 1,800 of such Pages of Testimony to the ambassador of Israel on the evening of November 17, 2011.

1,019 of these Pages provide information on women, men, and children Yad Vashem had no information about thus far – among them the artist Käthe Loewenthal from Berlin. The remaining 779 Pages of Testimony contain significant additional information on the victims. All of the data was collected in preparation for the biographies for the Room of Names by the staff of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Students filled out the Pages of Testimony by hand, on a voluntary basis.

Yad Vashem
Since 1953, Israel’s biggest state memorial, Yad Vashem, has collected so-called ‘witness pages’ on victims of the Holocaust. These Pages of Testimony are a kind of replacement for missing tombstones of children, women and men. They are preserved in a special exhibition space (»Hall of Names«) at the memorial.

Room of Names
For the opening of the Memorial, in May 2005, the Foundation researched 711 short biographies of murdered Jews from all over Europe. They were then recorded by professional speakers at the Hauptstadtstudio of the ZDF. Since then, these biographies can be heard at the Room of Names in the Information Centre under the Field of Stelae. Thanks to the generous financial support of the Support Association, and the support of the broadcasting services rbb, ARD and Cine Plus, more than 10,000 additional biographies of Jewish women, men, and children have since then been researched and recorded.