Established in 1953 by an act of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is entrusted with the task of commemorating, documenting, researching and educating about the Holocaust: remembering the six million Jews murdered by the German Nazis and their collaborators, the destroyed Jewish communities, and the ghetto and resistance fighters; and honoring the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem encompasses 45 acres on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem and is comprised of various museums, research and education centers, monuments and memorials. Among these are the Museum Complex, the Hall of Remembrance, the Valley of the Communities and the Children’s Memorial.

Each year some one million people visited Yad Vashem, and millions more visit its website, which is now available in eight languages.

With increasing interest being displayed worldwide in the events of the Holocaust as well as its Jewish and universal significance, and dramatic changes in the basic tools for commemoration, Yad Vashem continually strives to meaningfully impart the memory and meanings of the Holocaust to future generations. In order to meet the challenges facing Holocaust remembrance more than a half a century after the end of World War II, Yad Vashem has created an environment of multidimensional learning and commemoration comprised of four basic components:

Documentation

The collection and transfer to Yad Vashem of documents from Europe and North Africa, the filming of survivors’ testimonies, and the creation of the world’s largest and most comprehensive repository of material on the Holocaust on which the structure of remembrance rests, is an ongoing process.

The state-of-the-art Archives currently house hundreds of millions of pages of documentation, photographs, and video, audio and written testimonies. Efforts continue to collect the names and stories of each and every victim of the Holocaust, and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names now includes more than 4,800,000 names of Holocaust victims. The source of close to half the total number of names is from Pages of Testimony, while the remainder were gleaned from archival lists and documents.

The Library contains the world’s most comprehensive collection of published Holocaust-related material, allowing researchers, educators and the general public access to a wealth of published information on this seminal event in history.

Yad Vashem’s Visual Center is the foremost resource center of cinematic work related to the Holocaust. The Center allows access to survivor testimonies as well as Holocaust-related films of all genres – documentaries, feature films, personal family videos, animated films, news items and more – enabling database research and viewing of the entire film collection.

Research

The International Institute for Holocaust Research encourages, supports and advances scholarly studies on the Holocaust. Its projects help lay the foundations for additional investigation of the cataclysmic events that took place during the Shoah, not only providing a source of information, but also promoting future research by other scholars. Through its workshops and conferences, as well as the plethora of publications it publishes and disseminates, the Research Institute encourages stimulating academic discourse and promotes fresh insights into core topics of the Holocaust. A number of specialized research centers focus on the history of the Holocaust in the areas of the FSU, Poland and Germany, as well as the aftermath of the Shoah and its commemoration worldwide. The Institute also publishes Yad Vashem Studies, a biannual academic journal featuring articles on the cutting edge of research on the Holocaust, as well as some 30 books a year, ranging from in-depth research studies and encyclopedias to survivor memoirs and diaries.