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December 3, 2004/Kislev 20 5765, Vol. 57, No. 14
Web site chronicles Holocaust victims
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
RAMAT GAN, Israel - Sitting in her living room in Israel, Anita Noam inches her chair closer to the computer screen and peers at a grainy black and white image of her aunt that she has never seen before.
On the wall hang oil paintings of Venice's canals and back alleys that her aunt painted so many years ago.
Noam's aunt, Lisetta Luzzatto, was killed in 1944 at the age of 51 at Auschwitz. She died along with her husband, Cesare, a retired Italian army general who thought the Nazis would never dare come for him.
Their names, and the details of their lives and deaths, are now among three million entries collected in the world's largest database of Holocaust victims, created by Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial. The database was made available on the Internet last week and had already received about 1.85 million visitors.
Yad Vashem officials are using the launch of the database as part of an 11th-hour campaign to collect additional names, photographs and details of Jewish Holocaust victims. As the generation of survivors dies out, time to collect information is running short.
The officials said they expected relatives and friends might discover each other as a result of the database going online.
Such occurrences are a fortunate byproduct, they said, of the central mission of the database, which is to pay homage to the lives of those who met their deaths in the Holocaust by giving information about who they were before the Nazis came to power - to remember that behind each victim is a name and a story.
"It's to see the faces, to look into the people," said Avner Shalev, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate. "To see them as human beings - he was an artist, he was a shoemaker."
Yad Vashem began collecting "pages of testimony" commemorating the names and details of victims' lives in 1954. The process of computerizing the database began in 1994 and the project's cost was $22 million. It will cost another $4 million to complete the project as additional names and information come in now that the database is online, said Shalev.
Funding to date has come from private donors, in addition to the Yad Vashem budget, the Volcker Commission on Swiss bank accounts and the Claims Conference.
The cost of uploading the database was funded by businessman and high-tech entrepreneur Yossie Hollander, the son of a Holocaust survivor, and the Victim List Project of the Swiss banks settlement.
The undertaking was more enormous than anyone could have imagined, Shalev said. The biggest problem in assembling the database was the variety of name spellings - not only first and last names but place names that shifted as borders and ruling powers changed.
For the last 20 years, a team of linguists and geographers at Yad Vashem has been assembling a comprehensive lexicon of spelling variations.
The team found, for example, that there are 1,520 different ways to spell the name Isaac in the many languages and alphabets where the name appears, including Hebrew, Cyrillic and Latin.
The database was constructed with the broadest parameters possible. Dozens of variations of each name are included, taking into account various spellings, languages and nicknames.
Yad Vashem has collected 40,000 different Jewish last names with 370,000 variants.
Another challenge for those compiling the names was deciphering the handwriting of those who filled out pages of testimony. Styles of writing varied from region to region. In some areas a "P" would be written to appear like a "T". An additional hurdle was linking the Yiddish names for places often used by Jews to their official names. Often the names were entirely different.
Alexander Avraham, a linguist by training and director of the Hall of Names, said it was important for as many people as possible to visit the database and use it as an "interactive platform" - adding to existing information by submitting photographs or personal memories of victims.
"We want Jewish collective memory to remember them as they were," Avraham said. "This is our common legacy about that world that disappeared."
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