International Holocaust Remembrance Day
#EVERYNAMECOUNTS Challenge
Partnership with Arolsen Archives and Yad Vashem
January 26, 2022 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
| FreeBecome part of an international community that actively helps build the largest digital memorial to the victims of National Socialism. During this 48 hour challenge, we help the Arolsen Archives index documents from the Central Location Index (CLI) at Yad Vashem, which have never been indexed before.
Every number, every place, and every name you type in on the crowdsourcing platform will help preserve the memory of the persecutees – and make sure we never forget what happened to them.
This event features Elizabeth Berkowitz, our former Digital Interpretation Manager, who speaks about #everynamecounts at the Fritz Ascher Society, and Katharina Menschick from the Arolsen Archives, who introduces the Arolsen Archives and the current project. A welcome by Floriane Azoulay (Director) and a tour of the archives by Giora Zwilling (Deputy Head of Archives) are followed by a look at the documents of this specific challenge. We’ll learn how to enter data and will get to ask questions. It’s very easy to join in. You don’t need any special knowledge to take part.
Introduced by Rachel Stern, Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York.
Elizabeth Berkowitz is an art historian specializing in modern art historiography, pre-World War II European painting, and digital humanities strategies. Her writings have appeared in both popular and academic publications, and she has extensive experience as an educator and program developer for universities and cultural organizations. Elizabeth was previously the Fritz Ascher Society’s Digital Interpretation Manager for grant-based projects and is currently the Executive Director of the American Trust for the British Library.
Katharina Menschick studied International Development and Political Science in Vienna/Austria and received an MA in Liberal Studies from the City University of New York Graduate Center as a Fulbright Scholar in 2019. After working in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute New York she now is a research associate in the Research and Education Department at the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution.
The entire Central Location Index (CLI) collection contains 1,200,000 index cards and 250,000 documents, and it has never been indexed before. The data generated during the challenge will be made available in the online archive of the Arolsen Archives as well as in the database of Yad Vashem.
The Central Location Index (CLI) was an umbrella organization based in New York that coordinated the search for missing relatives – Jewish and non-Jewish – between 1944 and 1949. Most of the organizations who joined together under this banner to concentrate their efforts were American, but some came from other parts of the world. Before very long, the new organization had become one of the leading tracing agencies for missing relatives.
For this indexing challenge, we are collecting basic information about the missing persons recorded on the cards: e.g. their name, date of birth, place of birth, or profession. The cards also show the last known whereabouts of the person concerned, the details of the person who filed the tracing request at the time, and information on where surviving relatives might be found.
Help us index 20,000 documents in 48 hours, between 12:00pm on Jan. 26 and 12:00pm on Jan. 28!
The International Tracing Service (ITS), now called the Arolsen Archives, was established by the Allied powers in 1948 as a central search and information center. Today based in Germany and governed as a collaboration among eleven member countries, the international Arolsen Archives has since become the world’s most comprehensive repository of materials connected to National Socialist victims and survivors—currently documenting the persecution of over 17.5 million people. The Archives’ vast holdings include concentration camp, ghetto, and penal institution prisoner rolls; documents about forced laborers; personal effects taken from concentration camp inmates; and Displaced Persons records from the early post-war period, among many other testaments to lives lost and lived under Nazi persecution.
