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
NY State Young Republicans chapter disbanded amid racist, antisemitic chat scandal
(JTA) — New York’s state Young Republicans organization has been disbanded in the wake of leaked group chats in which officials joked about gas chambers, praised Adolf Hitler and used racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs.
“The Young Republicans was already grossly mismanaged, and vile language of the sort made in the group chat has no place in our party or its subsidiary organizations,” New York GOP chair Ed Cox said in a statement, adding that he sent formal notice of the shutdown to the National Federation of Young Republicans.
Earlier this week, the Kansas Young Republicans club was also dissolved. The moves are meant to allow for a fresh start for the Republican Party’s youth wing in those states following a Politico exposé that published thousands of messages involving participants in multiple states.
Of them, several participants had ties to New York Republican politics. Since the reporting, some involved lost jobs or had political opportunities withdrawn.
The scandal has also fueled partisan squabbling. Amid the fallout, the Republican Jewish Coalition posted on X in response to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s criticism of GOP “silence,” writing: “We strongly condemn the comments and those involved should step aside. See how easy that is?”
The post then turned into a political attack: “Your turn @SenSchumer: condemn Jay Jones, Zohran Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and more, in your deranged, radicalized party. You won’t. Enjoy the political wilderness in the meantime!”
Republican leaders have largely denounced the messages with House Speaker Mike Johnson saying the party “roundly condemn[s]” them. Vice President J.D. Vance, however, downplayed the uproar, saying “kids do stupid things” and calling the jokes “very offensive” but not worthy of life-ruining consequences.
The people involved are largely in their 20s, and the Young Republicans aim to engage conservatives between 18 and 40.
The post NY State Young Republicans chapter disbanded amid racist, antisemitic chat scandal appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Palestinian man who allegedly participated in Oct. 7 attack on Israel arrested in Louisiana
(JTA) — A Palestinian man in Louisiana was arrested Thursday after federal prosecutors accused him of participating in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.
Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi, 33, a Palestinian resident of Lafayette, Louisiana, is accused of being an operative for the National Resistance Brigades, a Gaza-based paramilitary group that took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.
“After hiding out in the United States, this monster has been found and charged with participating in the atrocities of October 7 — the single deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.
The government’s case against Al-Muhtadi appears to represent the first arrest on U.S. soil of anyone alleged to have participated in the deadly 2023 attack, in which 1,200 people in Israel, most civilians, were killed and 251 people were taken hostage.
On that day, after Al-Muhtadi learned of the attacks, he allegedly “armed himself, recruited additional marauders, and then entered Israel,” according to a statement by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg.
According to transcripts of cell phone calls Al-Muhtadi allegedly made that morning, he told another man to “get ready” and that “the borders are open,” and later requested a “full magazine.”
Al-Muhtadi’s phone also used a cell tower located near Kibbutz Kfar Aza in Israel, where at least 62 residents were killed and 19 were taken hostage during the attacks, according to court documents.
He entered the United States on Sept. 12, 2024, after allegedly providing false information on his U.S. visa application to immigration authorities, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
A criminal complaint against Al-Muhtadi was filed on Oct. 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, on the eve of the second anniversary of the attack. He was charged with providing, attempting to provide or conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization as well as visa fraud, according to the criminal complaint.
The arrest comes as the U.S. government seeks legal redress against those who perpetrated the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, which included U.S. citizens among the victims. In September 2024, the Justice Department also filed charges against six Hamas officials, including Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar shortly before he was killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.
Bondi established the Joint Task Force October 7, which the Justice Department is calling JTF 10-7, in February 2025 to investigate the attacks. The task force discovered Al-Muhtadi’s presence in the United States, according to the Justice Department’s press release, and JTF 10-7 and the FBI New Orleans Field Office are now investigating the case along with Israeli authorities.
The post Palestinian man who allegedly participated in Oct. 7 attack on Israel arrested in Louisiana appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Far-right UK activist Tommy Robinson visits Israel on invite of Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli
(JTA) — Far-right British agitator Tommy Robinson, known for his anti-Muslim rhetoric and leadership of the now-defunct extremist British Defense League, is in Israel this week on the invitation of Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli.
Together, Robinson and Chikli toured the site of the Nova music festival massacre, explored Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market on Friday morning and met with a prominent anti-immigration activist, Sheffi Paz, in Tel Aviv.
Robinson has been at the forefront of Britain’s anti-immigration movement and has also been imprisoned five times in the last 20 years for fraud, drug offenses and libeling a 15-year-old Syrian refugee. In 2023, he was arrested for attending a march against antisemitism against the wishes of the march’s Jewish organizers.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the largest Jewish organization in the United Kingdom, decried Chikli’s invitation in a post on X last week.
“Tommy Robinson is a thug who represents the very worst of Britain. His presence undermines those genuinely working to tackle Islamist extremism and foster community cohesion,” the group said. “Minister Chikli has proven himself to be a Diaspora Minister in name only. In our darkest hour, he has ignored the views of the vast majority of British Jews, who utterly and consistently reject Robinson and everything he stands for.”
Chikli pushed back on the Board of Deputies’ assessment, and accused them of becoming “openly aligned with left-wing, woke, pro-Palestinian parties.” (In August, the group called for a rapid increase in Gaza aid months after previously disciplining its members for signing an open letter condemning the war in Gaza.)
Now, after arriving in Israel Wednesday, Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, used the opportunity to take aim at U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“I’ve arrived in the beautiful nation of Israel 🇮🇱,” wrote Robinson, who is not Jewish, in a post on X. “A country with strong, patriotic leadership in @netanyahu and his party. Unlike the weak and cowardly @Keir_Starmer and his party of wrong’uns in the UK.”
Chikli has long associated himself with far-right activists and politicians in Europe, with whom he shares an interest in opposing Muslim immigration. Earlier this year, he stirred controversy by inviting far-right leaders from Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and France to speak at Israel’s International Conference on Combating Antisemitism.
On Thursday, Robinson posted an interview clip with Chikli where he asked the minister whether he believed Britain will “have to experience its own Oct. 7” in order to “realize that these terror organizations must be stopped.”
“I really hope you shouldn’t, but in order to make sure it will never happen, you need all other set of tools to address this challenge, and you need to be far, far more decisive, far, far more aggressive, and to understand that it most likely, it won’t go smooth and it won’t go quietly,” Chikli answered. “But if you won’t do it, I’m not sure there’s going to be Britain.”
Robinson posted videos showing shoppers approaching him and Chikli in Mahane Yehuda to express their support, and their opposition to U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who recently recognized an independent Palestinian state over the objections of the organized Jewish community in Britain and the Israeli government.
“Despite @BoardofDeputies saying I wasn’t welcome, the residents of Jerusalem welcomed me with open arms,” Robinson wrote.
The post Far-right UK activist Tommy Robinson visits Israel on invite of Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli appeared first on The Forward.