Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post Holocaust ‘Book of Names’ to be inaugurated at the UN underscores the individual identities of the 6 million appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Thousands Protest Over Israeli President Herzog’s Visit to Australia in Wake of Bondi Massacre
Demonstrators gather at Town Hall Square to protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s state visit to Australia following a deadly mass shooting during a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Dec. 14, 2025, in Sydney, Australia, Feb. 9, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jeremy Piper
Thousands gathered across Australia on Monday to protest over the arrival of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who is on a multi-city trip aimed at expressing solidarity with Australia‘s Jewish community following a deadly mass shooting last year.
Herzog is visiting Australia this week following an invitation from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the aftermath of the Dec. 14 shooting at a Hanukkah event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach that killed 15.
The visit has attracted the ire of some people in Australia, who accuse Herzog of being complicit in civilian deaths in Gaza. Anti-Israel groups have organized protests in cities and towns across the country on Monday evening.
In Sydney, thousands gathered in a square in the city’s central business district, listening to speeches and shouting pro-Palestinian slogans.
“The Bondi massacre was terrible but from our Australian leadership there’s been no acknowledgment of the Palestinian people and the Gazans,” said Jackson Elliott, a 30-year-old protestor from Sydney.
“Herzog has dodged all the questions about the occupation and says this visit is about Australia and Israeli relations but he is complicit.”
There was a heavy police presence with a helicopter circling overhead and officers patrolling on horseback.
Police used pepper spray and tear gas to push back groups of people who were trying to breach the line and march ahead. Several protesters were arrested as they clashed with police.
Authorities in Sydney declared Herzog’s visit a major event and were authorized to use rarely invoked powers during the visit, including the ability to separate and move crowds, restrict their entry to certain areas, direct people to leave, and search vehicles.
On Monday in a Sydney court, the Palestine Action Group – which organized the protest – failed to legally challenge the restrictions on the demonstration.
PRESIDENT COMMEMORATES LIVES LOST
Meanwhile, thousands of Jewish community members, government officials, and opposition party politicians welcomed Herzog at an event, more than a kilometer away from the protests, honoring the victims of the Bondi attack.
“We all remember the boycotts, the threats, the colleagues who turned their backs on their Jewish friends … that was the prelude to Bondi,” he told a large crowd at Sydney’s International Convention Centre, according to an ABC News report.
Herzog began his visit earlier on Monday at Bondi Beach, where he laid a wreath at a memorial for the victims of the attack. He also met survivors and the families of 15 people killed in the shooting.
“This was also an attack on all Australians. They attacked the values that our democracies treasure, the sanctity of human life, the freedom of religion, tolerance, dignity, and respect,” Herzog said in remarks at the site.
In a statement, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Co-Chief Executive Alex Ryvchin said Herzog’s visit “will lift the spirits of a pained community.”
Uncategorized
Saudi Arabia Wealth Fund Set to Announce Strategy Revamp, Sources Say
A billboard at the site of New Murabba shows The Mukaab, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Benmansour
Saudi Arabia‘s $925 billion Public Investment Fund (PIF) plans to announce a new five-year strategy this week, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said, in the biggest reset yet of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s economic transformation plan.
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund soft-launched its new 2026-2030 strategy with key investors and strategic partners on Monday on the sidelines of a conference in Riyadh, the two people and another familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The new blueprint will emphasize sectors including industry, minerals, artificial intelligence, and tourism, while scaling back and in some cases reconfiguring expensive mega projects such as The Line, a futuristic mirrored city, the sources said.
All three sources declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
One said the new roadmap will place greater emphasis on attracting capital from major global asset managers, reflecting mounting fiscal pressures as oil prices remain well below levels needed to fund the kingdom’s ambitious transformation agenda.
The shift marks the most significant recalibration to date of bin Salman’s Vision 2030, which for nearly a decade has prominently featured mega futuristic developments. The kingdom is currently reviewing several of the mega projects.
Many of these, including The Line, which extends 170 km (106 miles) into the desert, and the planned Trojena winter sports hub, have faced delays and ballooning costs. The latest to be suspended was a cube-shaped skyscraper in Riyadh.
Last month, Saudi Economy Minister Faisal al-Ibrahim told Reuters: “We’re very transparent. We’re not going to shy away from saying we had to shift this project, delay it, re-scope it,” without mentioning specific projects.
Under the new strategy, NEOM will shift away from its earlier emphasis on tourism and futuristic urban design toward renewable energy and industrial development, including green hydrogen, solar and wind projects, and data centers that benefit from their proximity to the sea for cooling, the people said.
The Line was not on display in the venue at Monday’s opening day of the private sector forum, while NEOM’s video displays underscored the new direction, focusing on energy and industrial initiatives rather than the high‑profile real estate and tourism concepts once billed as being at its core.
PIF’s updated focus echoes details previously reported by Reuters, including a broader shift toward logistics, mining, and advanced manufacturing, as well as clean energy and religious tourism.
Uncategorized
US Issues Fresh Guidance to Vessels Transiting Strait of Hormuz as Iran Tensions Simmer
A map showing the Strait of Hormuz and Iran is seen behind a 3D printed miniature of US President Donald Trump in this illustration taken June 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The United States issued fresh guidance on Monday to commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane for Middle East oil supplies, as tensions simmered between Washington and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program and brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters.
Iran has in the past threatened to close down the Strait of Hormuz, a portion of which lies within its territorial waters, and has at times seized commercial ships and oil tankers moving through the area alleging smuggling.
The US Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration advised US-flagged commercial vessels to stay as far from Iran’s territorial waters as possible and to verbally decline Iranian forces permission to board if asked, according to the guidance.
“It is recommended that US-flagged commercial vessels transiting these waters remain as far as possible from Iran’s territorial sea without compromising navigational safety,” according to the guidance posted on its web site.
It also said crews should not forcibly resist Iranian forces if they board.
“If Iranian forces board a US-flagged commercial vessel, the crew should not forcibly resist the boarding party,” it said.
Iran‘s top diplomat said on Friday that nuclear talks with the US mediated by Oman were off to a good start and set to continue, in remarks that could help allay concern that failure to reach a deal might nudge the Middle East closer to war.
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Washington has said it also wants the talks to cover Iran‘s ballistic missiles, support for armed groups around the region, and human rights.
President Donald Trump ratcheted up the pressure on Iran on Friday with an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on imports from any country that “directly or indirectly” purchases goods from Iran, following through on a threat he made last month.