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Last update - 11:29 01/05/2008 Holocaust Remembrance Day With help of Haredim, Yad Vashem IDs another 120,000 Shoah victims By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox  Over 120,000 thousand previously undocumented names of Holocaust victims have been gathered by Yad Vashem over the past year and a half, mainly from forms filled by ultra-Orthodox survivors. Teams of volunteers for the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority have been visiting ultra-Orthodox homes for the elderly and assisting survivors in filling in forms with information about themselves and their families. "Historically, it has been difficult for Yad Vashem to reach the ultra-Orthodox community," Sarah Berkowitz, the manager of the institution's activities in the ultra-Orthodox community, said. "They realized the immense importance of commemorating, but had their own ways. Their public is built of communities that adhere to calls from their rabbis, and to enlist them we needed first to contact the rabbis of each and every community to ensure cooperation." Advertisement Ultra-Orthodox communities were for many decades not comfortable associating with a body like Yad Vashem, which is affiliated with the Zionist establishment, so they formed their own Holocaust remembrance organizations. In an attempt to bring them into the fold of the institution's work, Yad Vashem then decided to create a special archive called Ganzach Kiddush Hashem, which documents the ways ultra-Orthodox and other observant Jews have coped with the Holocaust. The head of the Ganzach Kiddush Hashem program, Rabbi David Skolsky, explained that there were a number of reasons for the ultra-Orthodox reluctance to confront the Holocaust: "A father does not want to be perceived by his children as a beaten and bruised man, so it was not spoken of for years. When they become grandfathers to grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they feel differently." A poster created by Ganzach Kiddush Hashem depicts a black-and-white photo of a bearded ultraOrthodox man. A symbol of the Ganzach Kiddush Hashem archive is also found on each form handed out within wthe observant community. "When they arrived in Israel, the first thing survivors did was set up synagogues to act as the center of their communal lives and commemorate what had happened," said Avner Telshir, who is documenting such synagogues for the project. He is one of 25 volunteers working on the project. Another team is documenting the tombstones above ultra-Orthodox graves. Often the names of victims who did not have proper burial have been added to regular headstones. Two other workers have gone over thousands of sacred books published over the past 60 years whose authors added pages bearing the names of relatives and friends killed by the Nazis. The information gathered in the program is being added to the already over three million "pages of testimony" compiled by Yad Vashem to commemorate each Holocaust victim it has already succeeded in identifying. Related articles: Understanding the Holocaust There are no Holocaust survivors Police to up activity against places of entertainment open on Holocaust Day Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hamas on the Holocaust Al-Aqsa TV claims Jews concocted the Holocaust. Grasping genocide How a non-Jew in Israel came to understand the Holocaust.   1.   Yad Vashem also avoided the haredim 07:44  |  Jonathan 01/05/08   2.   1.Jonathan is right, Observant Jews were in the majority 11:58  |  S Judah 01/05/08   3.   why play the blaming game #1 + #2? 13:13  |  Tzemah 01/05/08   4.   # 2 Judah lets not also forget 14:07  |  SJ 01/05/08   5.   The Haradim caused the Shoah 15:45  |  Anat 01/05/08   6.   Anat, your comment is sick 16:25  |  Peretz 01/05/08   7.   Poor anat 18:40  |  Christoph Benning 01/05/08   8.   Why practice extermination? 22:20  |  knicknaime 01/05/08   9.   Demand of apology from Anat to haredim 23:35  |  Yaakov 01/05/08   10.   Yad Vashem 05:08  |  Leonard Oberstein 02/05/08   11.   #8 KNICKNAIME 05:33  |  KeepingItRealJew 02/05/08   12.   Religious life during Holocaust 09:20  |  Khana Feiler 02/05/08   13.   5 Repulsive comments by Anat and SJ 11:59  |  S Judah 02/05/08

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