Every Person Has a Name

The project's goal is to commemorate the victims individually, ensuring that at the very least the names of the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust are recorded.

In 1989, Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands Chaim Roth and the Second Generation organization of children of Holocaust survivors headed by Billy Leniado (based on an idea by a Dutch newspaper correspondent in Israel, Ed Rosenthal) organized a demonstration in front of the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv to protest the release of Nazi criminals from prison in the Netherlands.

The demonstration and the participants' reactions to the name-reading led initiator Chaim Roth, together with Billy Leniado, to launch the "Every Person Has a Name" commemoration project to honor the memory of the victims as unique individuals rather than an incomprehensible number.

The project was later embraced by Yad Vashem which now heads it, and as part of it, the names of hundreds of thousands of victims are read out each year in Israel and around the world.

The ceremony's core is the reading of the names of individuals who perished in the Holocaust, including family members, acquaintances, and friends of the participants.