The following is an announcement written by JRI-Poland.org:

Highlights:

• • JRI-Poland.org announces that researchers on its website will now be able to go directly to Pages of Testimony search results within Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names

  • This Partnership will streamline JRI-Poland.org users’ experience and provide the ability to add to the Yad Vashem Names Database new Pages of Testimony substantiated with biographical documentation.

  • Family Historians researching the current or former territories of Poland can now more easily determine whether their relatives have been memorialized or whether they can elaborate on the known life events for a Shoah victim using the JRI-Poland database.

Jerusalem — December 6, 2021 —JRI-Poland.org, an independent non-profit organization, announces a new partnership initiative with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, to display a direct link to matching Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony search as part of a genealogical search on the Jewish Records Indexing – Poland website. Recognizing the importance of the family historian for advancing Yad Vashem's mission to memorialize each one of the 6 million Shoah (Holocaust) victims, Yad Vashem will now allow a surname search on JRI-Poland.org to simultaneously search the Yad Vashem repository of documents and display a link to those search results through an API (Application Programming Interface) on the JRI-Poland users' search results screen.

The choice of JRI-Poland.org for this promotional feature stems from JRI-Poland's 26-year success in utilizing its long-standing agreement with the Polish State Archives to document the largest pre-war European Jewish community, the Jews of the current or former territories of Poland. Alexander Avram, Director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names in Jerusalem observed that "while many shelves remain empty, bearing witness to more than one million individuals who have yet to be memorialized, we hope that partnerships like this with JRI-Poland can and will play an important role in helping us fill those vacant shelves and add a large number of Pages of Testimony in the years to come."

JRI-Poland Executive Director, Stanley Diamond of Montreal, Canada, remarked, "JRI-Poland is honored to assist Yad Vashem with its sacred duty by facilitating the preservation of a Shoah victim's memory and improving the retelling of major events in a Shoah victim's life. We do this by presenting the documentation of the vital events and at the same time indicating either the existence of - or the lack of - a tribute for these individuals in the Yad Vashem Hall of Names."

JRI-Poland Assistant Director, Robinn Magid of Berkeley, California, added, "Correlating vital records with a mention in the Hall of Names is the first step in presenting a more complete biography of people like my great-grandmother who were lost in the Shoah”. She added, “Yad Vashem and JRI-Poland are collaborating to increase the likelihood that our audiences will find something new, perhaps overlooked, and maybe even life-changing."

JRI-Poland Co-founder, Michael Tobias of Glasgow, Scotland commented, "Providing this new service to Yad Vashem is a natural extension of our core objective of providing our fellow researchers with the ability to recover details of their families' lives in Poland."

About Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is the ultimate source for Holocaust education, documentation and research. From the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem's integrated approach incorporates meaningful educational initiatives, groundbreaking research and inspirational exhibits. Visit us at: yadvashem.org

About JRI-Poland.org

JRI-Poland.org is a collective of global volunteers preserving the details of our ancestors’ lives in a form that will remain accessible forever to the greatest number of researchers. We have built the largest database representing the lives of the Jews who lived in the current or former territories of Poland, their families and their communities. Visit us at: jri-poland.org