The Names Recovery Project of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Yerushalayim has for the past decade focused on collecting the names of the murdered Hungarian Jews, reports Ofer Aderet for Haaretz. Dr. Chaim Gertner, director of Yad Vashem’s archives division, noted that in 2007, Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names held the names of 260,000 (43%) of the 600,000 Hungarian Jews murdered by the Nazis. Some 225,000 additional names have now been identified (80% of the victims).

“We had the schedules of the transports and we knew when every train left Hungary for Auschwitz, from exactly where and with how many people,” said Dr. Alexander Avram, the director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names. “But we did not know who were the people on the trains.”

Some 20 local researchers were recruited in Hungary, Romania and Serbia, parts of which belonged to Hungary during World War II. “They searched about 20 archives for a decade, and turned page after page looking for documents that detailed the fate of Hungary’s Jews in the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem’s online database of Holocaust victims now contains 4.7 million names.

{Matzav.com Israel News Bureau}