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Holocaust ‘Book of Names’ to be inaugurated at the UN underscores the individual identities of the 6 million
When Yad Vashem was created in 1953 on the slopes of Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance to commemorate the Holocaust, its founders understood that one of the central functions of the institution would be to document the names of the 6 million Jewish victims.
It was seen as a moral imperative: to demonstrate that behind the almost inconceivable number were real individuals whose lives were cut short by the Nazis.
Now, to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, Yad Vashem is inaugurating its Book of Names — a monumental installation containing the names of 4,800,000 victims of the Shoah — at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Among those participating in the Book of Names opening ceremony on Jan. 26 will be U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Gilad Erdan, and Yad Vashem’s chairman, Dani Dayan, a former consul general of Israel in New York.
“The Shoah was the murder of 6 million individual Jews. Each one who died deserves to be remembered as an individual, and not only as part of a nameless collective,” Dayan said.
The Book of Names will be on display at the United Nations for a month. Afterward it will be transferred to its permanent location at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, where it will be open to public viewing in time for Yom HaShoah, the Israeli and Jewish Holocaust remembrance day, in April.
The installation is an updated version of the Yad Vashem Book of Names that has been on permanent display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland since 2017. The new version, which contains 500,000 additional names, stands 6.5 feet high and approximately 3.3 feet wide. Its total length is 26.5 feet. The massive volume lists the names of the victims in alphabetical order and, where the information is known, includes their birth dates, hometowns and places of death. The book has blank pages at the end symbolizing the approximately 1 million victims whose names are not yet recorded.
The names in the Book are sourced from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.
“We have been collecting the names of the individual Holocaust victims since 1954, mainly through Pages of Testimony,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. The Pages of Testimony are one-page forms that survivors and remaining family and friends complete with the names and biographical information of the victims.
“Starting about 20 years ago, we have been able to go beyond these pages and look to thousands of other sources for names,” Avram continues. “These include lists of victims produced by federal archives or organizations in different countries, deportation lists compiled by researchers and museums, and names gathered by memorial sites and institutions. We have also sourced hundreds of thousands of names from our own collections.”
The special team that finds the names and archives them in Yad Vashem’s names database is challenged by the fact that the Nazis either tried to eliminate traces of their crimes against humanity by destroying records, or never registered Jews’ names in the first place — especially in Eastern Europe.
“Few ghettos had censuses or name registrations,” noted Avram. “Hungarian transport lists had numbers, but not names — and they were all taken to extermination sites. Similarly, there were only numerical reports of the Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen [the mobile paramilitary killing squads organized by the Nazis]. At Auschwitz, 900,000, men, women and children were sent straight to their deaths. Only the names of those sent to slave labor there were registered on cards, and the Nazis destroyed most of these records.”
The Book of Names is one component of Yad Vashem’s new strategic plan to improve and increase Holocaust remembrance in Israel and the world at a time when the number of survivors is dwindling and Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise, Dayan said.
The names in the book are sourced from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, which the institution has been collecting since 1954. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem)
In addition to the permanent installations at Auschwitz and Yad Vashem, there are plans for a third version of the book to be created as a traveling exhibition.
“Our mission will be much more challenging, but also much more important and vital,” Dayan said of the coming era when no survivors remain. “We have to find innovative ways to reflect on and educate about what happened. I believe that you cannot remain indifferent to such a huge display when you see it.”
Dayan said he first experienced the power of the installation when he traveled to Auschwitz to see its initial version and found the names of his father’s uncles who were murdered in Poland.
New Yorker Bronia Brandman, a child survivor of Auschwitz originally from Jaworzno, Poland, was similarly moved when she embarked on a “roots trip” with her grandson Sruli Klaristenfeld in April 2017. Brandman’s large immediate and extended families were almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis.
Klaristenfeld navigated through the massive Book of Names at Auschwitz-Birkenau and found the names of his grandmother’s parents and other relatives. “It was a physical and permanent manifestation of their memory,” Klaristenfeld said.
Brandman said the impact of the monumental installation cannot be underestimated.
“People are indifferent. Many have no concept of the Holocaust ever happening and how it could be that 6 million innocent people were murdered in cold blood, including 1.5 million children,” she said. “The importance of the Book of Names is that the victims are immortalized for the future, and the past is never forgotten.”
Dayan said he looks forward to the Book of Names’ arrival at Yad Vashem after its display at the United Nations.
“Yad Vashem is the natural permanent home for the Book of Names,” Dayan said. “The public will be able to come and browse and find relatives, people with the same name as theirs or from the same locations as their families — or even to just pay respect to the victims.”
Avram said he expects the pages of the new book to be as worn from touch by visitors seeking the names of their family members as are the pages of the Book of Names exhibited at Auschwitz.
“Many families need a tangible, tactile way to reunite with the memory of the victims,” he said. “It’s the closest we can get to providing a gravestone.”
Meanwhile, the work of recovering the unknown victims’ names will continue apace, as it has for the last seven decades.
“It’s a debt we have toward the victims,” Dayan said. “We cannot let them be consigned to the lost pages of history. That is our promise to them — and to future generations.”
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Syrian Security Forces Use Gunfire to Disperse Rival Protests in Alawite Heartland
Alawites gather during a protest to demand federalism and the release of detained members of their community, in Latakia, Syria, Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Syrian security forces used gunfire on Tuesday to break up two rival groups of demonstrators in the coastal town of Latakia, heartland of the country’s Alawite minority, witnesses and officials said.
Syria has been rocked by several episodes of sectarian violence since longtime leader Bashar al-Assad, who hails from the Muslim Alawite minority, was ousted by a rebel offensive last year and replaced by a Sunni-led government.
Witnesses said hundreds of Alawite protesters had gathered to demand a decentralized political system in Syria and the release of men they say were unjustly detained by the country’s new authorities. Supporters of the government then gathered and began shouting insults at the Alawites.
About an hour into the Alawites’ rally, gunshots were heard in Agriculture Square, one of two town squares where the protesters had gathered, according to two witnesses and videos verified by Reuters. One of the verified videos showed a man lying motionless on the ground with a wound to the head.
There was no immediate official word on casualties.
Noureddine el-Brimo, the head of media relations in Latakia province, told Reuters security forces had fired into the air to disperse the rival protesters, and added that unknown assailants had also fired on civilians and on the security forces.
He gave no further details but witnesses said both protests had broken up by the afternoon.
‘THERE’S NO MORE SECURITY’
The rally had been called for by the head of the Supreme Alawite Islamic Council, Ghazal Ghazal, on Monday. He urged Alawites to protest peacefully.
“We demand to live in security, to go to school safely without kidnapping. This was the only place we used to feel security. Now there’s no more security and we’re exposed to kidnapping and fear,” said Leen, who attended the protest but declined to give her last name out of security concerns.
Nearly 1,500 Alawites were killed by government-linked forces in March after Assad loyalists ambushed state security. Reuters reported that dozens of Alawite women were later kidnapped, though authorities deny they were abducted.
Syria‘s President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former militant Islamist, has vowed to rule for all Syrians but the country’s nearly 14-year civil war and the bouts of violence over the last year have prompted fears of further instability.
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Zelenskiy Says Ukraine Ready to Move Forward With US-Backed Peace Plan
A rescuer walks next to a body of a resident killed by a Russian missile strike at a compound of the supermarket warehouse, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Handout via REUTERS
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that Kyiv was ready to move forward with a US-backed peace deal, and that he was prepared to discuss its sensitive points with US President Donald Trump in talks he said should include European allies.
In a speech to the so-called coalition of the willing, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Zelenskiy urged European leaders to hash out a framework for deploying a “reassurance force” to Ukraine and to continue supporting Kyiv for as long as Moscow shows no willingness to end its war.
Ukraine had signaled earlier in the day support for the framework of a peace deal with Russia but stressed that sensitive issues needed to be fixed at a meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump.
Kyiv’s message hinted that an intense diplomatic push by the Trump administration could be yielding some fruit but any optimism could be short-lived, especially as Russia stressed it would not let any deal stray too far from its own objectives.
US and Ukrainian negotiators held talks on the latest US-backed peace plan in Geneva on Sunday. US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll then met on Monday and Tuesday with Russian officials in Abu Dhabi, a spokesperson for Driscoll said.
US and Ukrainian officials have been trying to narrow the gaps between them over the plan to end Europe’s deadliest and most devastating conflict since World War II, with Ukraine wary of being strong-armed into accepting a deal largely on the Kremlin’s terms, including territorial concessions.
“Ukraine – after Geneva – supports the framework’s essence, and some of the most sensitive issues remain as points for the discussion between presidents,” a Ukrainian official said.
Zelenskiy could visit the United States in the next few days to finalize a deal with Trump, Kyiv’s national security chief Rustem Umerov said, though no such trip was confirmed from the US side.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that over the past week the US had made “tremendous progress towards a peace deal by bringing both Ukraine and Russia to the table.” She added: “There are a few delicate, but not insurmountable, details that must be sorted out and will require further talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States.”
Oil prices extended an earlier decline after reports of Ukraine potentially agreeing to a war-ending deal.
Underlining the high stakes for Ukraine, its capital Kyiv was hit by a barrage of missiles and hundreds of drones overnight in a Russian strike that killed at least seven people and again disrupted power and heating systems. Residents were sheltering underground wearing winter jackets, some in tents.
ZELENSKIY: WILL DISCUSS SENSITIVE ISSUES WITH TRUMP
US policy towards the war has zigzagged in recent months.
A hastily arranged summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August raised worries in Kyiv and European capitals that the Trump administration might accept many Russian demands, though the meeting ultimately resulted in more US pressure on Russia.
The 28-point plan that emerged last week caught many in the US government, Kyiv, and Europe alike off-guard and prompted fresh concerns that the Trump administration might be willing to push Ukraine to sign a peace deal heavily tilted toward Moscow.
The plan would require Kyiv to cede territory beyond the almost 20% of Ukraine that Russia has captured since its February 2022 full-scale invasion, as well as accept curbs on its military and bar it from ever joining NATO – conditions Kyiv has long rejected as tantamount to surrender.
The sudden push has raised the pressure on Ukraine and Zelenskiy, who is now at his most vulnerable since the start of the war after a corruption scandal saw two of his ministers dismissed, and as Russia makes battlefield gains.
Zelenskiy could struggle to get Ukrainians to swallow a deal viewed as selling out their interests.
He said on Monday the latest peace plan incorporated “correct” points after talks in Geneva. “The sensitive issues, the most delicate points, I will discuss with President Trump,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
Zelenskiy said the process of producing a final document would be difficult. Russia‘s unrelenting attacks on Ukraine have left many skeptical about how peace can be achieved soon.
“There was a very loud explosion, our windows were falling apart, we got dressed and ran out,” said Nadiia Horodko, a 39-year-old accountant, after a residential building was struck in Kyiv overnight.
“There was horror, everything was already burning here, and a woman was screaming from the eighth floor, ‘Save the child, the child is on fire!’”
MACRON WARNS AGAINST EUROPEAN CAPITULATION
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said an amended peace plan must reflect the “spirit and letter” of an understanding reached between Putin and Trump at their Alaska summit.
“If the spirit and letter of Anchorage is erased in terms of the key understandings we have established then, of course, it will be a fundamentally different situation [for Russia],” Lavrov warned.
A group of countries supporting Ukraine, which is known as the coalition of the willing and includes Britain and France, was also set to hold a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
“It’s an initiative that goes in the right direction: peace. However, there are aspects of that plan that deserve to be discussed, negotiated, improved,” French President Emmanuel Macron told RTL radio regarding the US-proposed plan. “We want peace, but we don’t want a peace that would be a capitulation.”
In a separate development, Romania scrambled fighter jets to track drones that breached its territory near the border with Ukraine early on Tuesday, and one was still advancing deeper into the NATO-member country, the defense ministry said.
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Hamas Attack Victims Sue Binance for Allegedly Allowing Payments to Terror Group
A logo on the Binance exhibition space at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 15, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Victims of Hamas‘s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel sued Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao, accusing them of facilitating millions of dollars in payments to the Islamist group and other US-designated terrorist organizations.
According to a complaint made public on Monday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange laundered money for Hamas even after pleading guilty in November 2023 and paying a $4.32 billion criminal penalty for violating federal anti-money-laundering and sanctions laws.
The plaintiffs include 306 American victims of Hamas‘s attack, including relatives of people killed, injured or taken hostage, and subsequent attacks by various groups.
They accused Binance of knowingly enabling Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to move more than $1 billion through its platform, including more than $50 million after the Oct. 7 attack.
Zhao pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations in connection with Binance‘s plea and served a four-month prison sentence. US President Donald Trump pardoned him on Oct. 23.
“Binance intentionally structured itself as a refuge for illicit activity,” the complaint said. “To this day, there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model.”
In a statement, Binance declined to discuss the lawsuit but said “we comply fully with internationally recognized sanctions laws.” A lawyer representing Zhao in related litigation declined to comment.
The lawsuit seeks compensatory and triple damages, among other remedies.
BIG TRANSACTIONS LINKED TO BRAZILIAN LIVESTOCK OPERATOR
According to the complaint, large sums of cryptocurrency went through accounts of people with no obvious financial means to explain them.
They allegedly included a Venezuelan woman who appeared to operate a Brazilian livestock-related company, Fazenda Amazonia, or Amazonia Farm in English.
Her account, opened in 2022 when she was 26, allegedly received more than $177 million in deposits, and more than $130 million in withdrawals were made, the complaint said.
“When a company chooses profit over even the most basic counterterrorism obligations, it must be held accountable – and it will be,” Lee Wolosky, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
The complaint was filed in North Dakota federal court. It said at least two suspicious transactions went through online addresses in Kindred, North Dakota, which has about 1,000 people.
Binance and Zhao are separately defending against a lawsuit by other attack victims in Manhattan federal court. The lawsuit claims they provided a “clandestine” funding mechanism for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to raise money and transact illegal business for several years.
A judge rejected the defendants’ motion to dismiss that case in February.