The World Memory Project, which is set to build the world’s largest online database of information on victims of the Holocaust, has been launched.
The joint venture by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and ancestry.com announced May 3 is recruiting the public to provide information on Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of non-Jews who were targeted for persecution by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
The World Memory Project will greatly expand the accessibility of the museum’s archival collection, which contains information on well over 17 million people targeted by Nazi racial and political policies, and will enable millions to conduct online searches, project organizers said in a statement.
Ancestry.com, which hosts its own online archival project, will provide proprietary software and manage the digitizing of the documents.
On May 2, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) made available online a collection of its records and photographs from the Holocaust period. The JDC project, which is not part of the World Memory Project, will feature a database of more than 500,000 names and photos from 14 countries where the JDC operated during and after World War II.
Users can search the names database compiled from historic documents and JDC client lists from operations in Barcelona, Shanghai, Kobe, Vilna, Australia, South America, and the JDC Emigration Service in Vienna and Munich. Photo galleries are available from Austria, Belgium, China, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain.
The JDC is inviting the public to tag photos and share their JDC stories from the Holocaust era.
