How many individual Jewish victims’ names have been collected by Yad Vashem and other archives?
Executive summary
Yad Vashem’s centralized effort has recorded and publicly presented between roughly 4.8 million and 5 million individual Jewish victims’ names, depending on which Yad Vashem product and date is cited: the Book of Names exhibited 4.8 million names in 2023 [1] [2], and Yad Vashem announced a milestone of 5 million names in late 2025 as embodied in its Central Database [3] [4]. Those figures sit against the larger, consensus estimate of about six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust [5] [6].
1. The numbers Yad Vashem itself publishes — why they differ
Yad Vashem’s public materials show a progression: the Book of Names opened in 2023 containing 4,800,000 recorded names collected since the institution’s founding [1] [2], its archival descriptions have cited about 4.5 million commemorated in the Central Database at certain points [7], and more recently Yad Vashem announced that the Central Database and related archival integrations reached five million registered names by November 2025 [4] [3]. Each of those statements is accurate for the specific product or snapshot being described, which explains apparent contradictions when the different numbers are quoted out of context [1] [7] [4].
2. What counts as “collected names” — Pages of Testimony versus archival lists
Yad Vashem’s core collection method is the Page of Testimony — one-page memorial forms submitted by survivors, family or acquaintances — and those pages form the heart of the Central Database and the Book of Names; historically the repository has housed millions of such pages (the circular repository has been described as holding approximately 2.7 million Pages of Testimony in some accounts) [8] [9]. Beyond Pages of Testimony, Yad Vashem incorporates names drawn from archival sources such as deportation lists, cemetery records and other institutional registries, and it explicitly notes that the Central Database includes names from varied archives as well as submitted Pages of Testimony [9] [4]. That mixture of source-types affects totals because one person may appear in multiple records or only in a single archival list.
3. How other archives figure into the tally
Yad Vashem leads an international aggregation effort: it has partnered with museums, national registries and research initiatives so that many external projects’ results are integrated into Yad Vashem’s Central Database [9]. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and other national projects are both contributors and collaborators, but there is no single, independent global total separate from Yad Vashem’s aggregation presented in the provided reporting; instead, other archives’ name-collections are often merged into the Yad Vashem database for searching and commemoration [9].
4. The gap to “six million” and realistic limits on future recovery
Yad Vashem and historians acknowledge that the approximately six million Jewish victims figure is an estimate derived from demographic and documentary methods, not a summation of a single list produced by perpetrators [5] [6]. Yad Vashem has publicly accepted that some portion of the remaining roughly one million names (by comparison to the six‑million estimate) may never be recovered, while also noting that ongoing projects and emerging technologies could add hundreds of thousands more names [10] [1]. That admission highlights both the moral urgency of the Names Recovery Project and the practical limits posed by destroyed records and vanished communities [1] [10].
5. Bottom line and the reporting caveat
The best defensible, sourced answer based on the provided reporting is that Yad Vashem’s aggregated work and its Central Database/Book of Names contain between 4.8 million (Book of Names, 2023) and 5 million (Central Database milestone, November 2025) recorded individual Jewish victim names, with many additional names held in contributing archives and the possibility that several hundred thousand more could be identified with intensive research — but a sizeable remainder, compared to the roughly six million estimated total victims, will likely remain anonymous [1] [4] [3] [5] [10]. The reporting does not provide a separate, consolidated global total from all archives beyond Yad Vashem’s integrated database, so statements about a higher aggregate outside Yad Vashem’s tally cannot be confirmed from these sources [9].