Hall of Names

The Hall of Names is the central memorial archive within Yad Vashem dedicated to recording the identities of Holocaust victims. Housed in a cone-shaped concrete structure open to the sky at its apex, it preserves Pages of Testimony — short biographical forms submitted by survivors, relatives, and acquaintances documenting the names and lives of those murdered. Names have also been added from deportation lists, concentration and extermination camp records, and ghetto files, all searchable in a central database. Roughly four million of the estimated six million Jewish victims have been documented so far, and the collection continues to grow. The space is designed for quiet contemplation: the cone of light above and the awareness of the names still missing give visitors a visceral sense of the scale of the genocide.