Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, announced Nov. 3 it has now recovered the names of 5 million of the estimated 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It has taken 37 years to compile the list. The center hopes to recover 250,000 more names.
At the beginning of World War II, there were some 16.6 million Jews in the world, some 0.8% of the world’s population. With the Jewish population up to roughly 16 million today, that’s just 0.2% of the world’s population. About half live in Israel.
Saluting the work done to recover the names, Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, told the Jewish News Service that this should serve as “a warning to us all, especially at this time when antisemitism, calling not only for the death of the Jews but also the eradication of their state, is exploding throughout the world.”