The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Holocaust survivors’ testimonials, as archived by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, are among the 54 new additions to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register.

The collection of “pages of testimony”—a form issued by Yad Vashem in efforts to document the lives of Holocaust survivors—was founded in 1954 and contains about 2.6 million testimonials. The forms were filled out by relatives and friends of the victims. The testimonials are part of Yad Vashem’s project to document the names of all the victims of the Holocaust. So far, the project has recorded the names of some 4.2 million victims.

UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, established in 1995, is not a physical collection, but a list. The items in the register remain in their original locations. The Yad Vashem collection is the first Israeli entry in this forum.