To: Rabbis, Officers, Synagogue Leaders

From: Betty Ehrenberg, Director, International Affairs and Community Relations

Re: Yad Vashem--Page of Testimony for each Holocaust victim

Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The number is beyond comprehension yet when we put a name to each one, when we learn about who each one was and what happened to him or her, the number loses its abstract quality and the names of each victim are truly memorialized. In fact, if we fail to name the names, it is as though we are losing each life a second time around.

Yad Vashem, in its Hall of Names, is seeking to memorialize the names of the victims of the Holocaust. The archives, so far, contain over 50 million pages of documents in an attempt to collect personal testimonies from family members or from someone who knew, loved and cared for the victim in order to memorialize that person.

So far, Yad Vashem has the names of 3 million of the Holocaust victims recorded in its Hall of Names. They are launching a worldwide Pages of Testimony campaign to complete the records for the remaining victims and are reaching out to every Jewish community in the United States to help complete their mission by the year 2000.

Our enemies, in their search to revise history and thereby adding an obscene insult to the victims, tell us that it did not happen or, as David Duke said in his recently published book, quoted only two weeks ago on Meet the Press, "The numbers of those killed have been grossly inflated".

In combating this trend, it is therefore all the more important to help us find the names, for then each page of testimony becomes a symbolic tombstone that helps us not only understand the history of each victim as an individual, but help us recreate an accurate image of European Jewry before World War II as well as telling the world the true nature of their fates.

The collection of these names is a supremely important task, as there may be between 200,000 and 300,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel and many, many more abroad. These survivors would fill in Pages of Testimony that would add more names to the register and people would come forth and offer their testimonies for the historical record.

It is very important that you, members of your family, and your synagogue fill out these Pages of Testimony. The Orthodox Union is making them available and will be happy to send them out to you and to your synagogue. Kindly contact 1-800-310-7495 to obtain the Pages of Testimony.

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: "I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heaven!" (Exodus 17,14)