Volunteers Seek Holocaust Survivors, Victims’ Names

SOUTHBURY — Members of the Jewish Federation’s Holocaust Survivors and Second Generation Group have met this past year with volunteers from the Yad Vashem Names Recovery Project Committee to record the names of both survivors and victims of the Holocaust. The Names Recovery Project volunteers are now seeking to interview other people who had Jewish relatives who perished in the Holocaust.

Donald Garber of Heritage Village in Southbury has been spearheading the committee that is helping to record the names of those victims, as well as relatives who survived the Holocaust. An avid student of Jewish history and genealogy, Mr Garber feels passionately about the importance of recording the names of Jewish Holocaust victims before they are forgotten. Last summer he met with staff at the Federation, Jewish Communities of Western Connecticut, to talk about getting the word out about the Names Recovery Campaign of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which has a mandate to memorialize and preserve the legacy of each individual Jew who died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

Yad Vashem has been collecting “Pages of Testimony” since the mid 1950s. Submitted by survivors, relatives or friends of victims, Pages of Testimony are preserved in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem.

“We must remain mindful of the fact that unless we assume collective responsibility for completing this vital mission, some of those names may be lost forever,” Mr Garber said. “This is a race against time, before those who remember the victims are no longer with us. I wish to thank all our volunteers for the help and effort that they are making in this ambitious and worthwhile project. We got started last fall without much knowledge of what we were supposed to do. We are now running fairly smoothly, having collected more than 120 Pages of Testimony as well as 20 Survivor Registrations, photographs of victims and supporting documents.”

In November 2004, the Page of Testimony collection was integrated into the Central Database of Shoah Victims Names, where brief histories and photographs of more than three million Holocaust victims may be accessed online. A revolutionary milestone in Holocaust remembrance and learning, this online resource provides the opportunity to search for names, photographs, and brief histories of over three million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

For more information on the Yad Vashem Names Recovery Project, Don Garber can be reached at 203-262-8606 or woken5230@mypacks.net.