Coronavirus shutdowns and travel restrictions are limiting the ways people will be able to honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, but the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel is re-launching a program online to help persons around the world recall the victims. With Holocaust memorial day on Wednesday, January 27, Yad Vashem this week re-launched the IRemember Wall online program that allows persons who sign up to be “matched” with a Holocaust victim and that link published to the website as a way to publicly remember the victim.
The IRemember Wall includes links to photos and details of the individuals murdered in the Holocaust, with options for visitors to be randomly matched with one of the 4.8 million victim’s names currently in the Yad Vashem database or to specifically request a match with a particular victim, according to a press release on the Yad Vashem website.
“Thank you for giving me a place to acknowledge the individual and not the just statistics,” one of last year’s IRemember Wall participants, Catherine F., was quoted in the press release as saying.
In an effort to more broadly spread the remembrance efforts, Yad Vashem is encouraging the person matched with a victim to share that story on social media and once again, Facebook is partnering with Yad Vashem to promote the project.
“By partnering together with Facebook, we are able to reach a wider international audience, which is crucial to keeping the memory of the Jewish victims alive and the meanings of the Holocaust relevant in today’s complex reality,” Iris Rosenberg, director of Yad Vashem’s Communications Division, said in the press release.
“Last year, over 85,000 victims were commemorated by people from some 175 countries around the world in their own languages—making each participant an ‘ambassador of memory,’ responsible for promulgating the voices of those who were murdered.”
While social media continues to deal with allegations of not properly policing anti-Semitism online, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg expressed strong support for Yad Vashem’s Holocaust remembrance effort.
“I am so grateful for all that Yad Vashem does to honor the victims of the Holocaust—including this incredible IRemember Wall project,” Sandberg said in the press release. “Facebook is honored to be a part of this project, helping to tell the story of the millions of women, men, and children murdered by the Nazis. They deserve to be remembered so this never happens again.”
The IRemember Wall, which is linked on the Yad Vashem website, has been launched in six languages—English, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German and Russian. The program not only promotes global remembrance of the Holocaust, it also enables participants to get to know the persons whose lives were cut short in the atrocity. As one of last year’s participants, Liana L., was quoted in the press release as saying, “This is a great initiative and I am grateful for being able to learn about three victims and reflect about their lives… they will never be forgotten.”
The link to the IRemember Wall is located here: https://iremember.yadvashem.org/?p=217&&utm_source=pr&utm_medium=organic-english&utm_campaign=ihrd-2021&utm_content=iremember-wall
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, January 24, 2021)