Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to identify and record the names of Holocaust victims previously lost in the vast archives of World War II documentation.
The renowned memorial and museum houses a staggering 230 million pages of text documents and over 500,000 photographs related to the Holocaust. For decades, Yad Vashem has relied on survivors and their families submitting so-called "Pages of Testimony" to gather the names of those murdered by the Nazis. However, this painstaking manual process has limitations, as many families were completely wiped out, leaving no one to record their names.
Video: Yad Vashem uses AI to identify names of more Holocaust victims / Credit: Reuters
Now, Yad Vashem has developed an innovative AI tool capable of sifting through millions of documents, triangulating information, and extracting previously overlooked victim names and details. By deploying this technology, the museum aims to reach a milestone of recording over 5 million Holocaust victim names by 2029.
"AI helps us by reviewing testimonies and extracting names that have until now gone unnoticed," Simmy Allen, a spokesperson for Yad Vashem, explained. "Up until recently, we predominantly relied on human intervention, however, this process is extremely time-consuming."
The AI model, developed by Yad Vashem's Information Technology Division, has already yielded remarkable results. In one case, it identified the names of several members of the Grudzinski family from Lithuania, including a woman named Etele and her husband, a veterinarian previously known only as Swajlach. Their names were uncovered by cross-referencing survivor testimonies and applying pattern-matching techniques.
Thanks to AI, "these names can now be added to the database so we can restore an identity from the oblivion of the Holocaust and also give a better picture of who they were before they fell victim to antisemitism," Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem's Shoah Names Recovery Project, said.
