In a milestone nearly eight decades in the making, Yad Vashem announced that it has successfully recovered the names of five million Jews murdered in the Holocaust—an unprecedented effort to restore individual identity to victims whom the Nazis sought to erase from human memory.

“Behind each name is a life that mattered,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. “A child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever.”

Researchers at the memorial said that while roughly one million victims’ names may never be recovered, artificial intelligence and machine learning are now being used to analyze “hundreds of millions of archival documents” to uncover another 250,000 names.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that six million Jews were systematically exterminated during the Holocaust, a figure derived from Nazi records, demographic analyses, Jewish community archives, and resistance documentation.

Holocaust scholars hailed the achievement as a moral victory against Nazi dehumanization. “So many Jews, whose names we thought we’d never know, have been redeemed from having been totally erased by history,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism during the Biden administration and Dorot professor at Emory University, told JNS.

Lipstadt cautioned, however, that “no evidence, however sound, will change the minds of Holocaust deniers. Holocaust denial is antisemitism, and Holocaust deniers are antisemites.”

A January 2025 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that in seven of eight countries surveyed, at least 20% of respondents believed that two million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust—a sobering indicator of the persistence of ignorance and denial.

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