The Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, will for the first time be available to researchers at the click of a mouse, detailing ages of victims, places of birth, occupations and where they were murdered by the Nazis.

Its launch is the culmination of five years of intensive labour, at the height of which 1,000 people worked around the clock to transfer more than three million handwritten forms on to a computer database.

The organisation is urging Jewish families around the world to check it and submit unrecorded names via the site.

The project is launched at a crossroads in Holocaust research. “We are at the eleventh hour in our endeavours to gather in all the remaining missing names of the victims,” said Avner Shalev, the director of Yad Vashem.

With the last of the generation of survivors of the Shoah dwindling, Mr Shalev hopes that putting the names on the internet will provide one final push for researchers.

“We know for sure that many people have never spoken, whether for psychological or other reasons,” he said. “Now either they or their relatives and friends will find it much easier to send in the missing details.”

The data-gathering campaign began in the 1950s, shortly after Yad Vashem was established by an act of the Knesset as the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority and entrusted with the task of recovering the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Researchers made door-to-door calls throughout Israel, asking survivors to fill out the centre’s Pages of Testimony. Eight hundred thousand names were gathered and over the intervening decades visitors to Yad Vashem brought the total to two million.

In 1999 the process was given a boost by the Volcker Commission, established to track the victims’ assets in Swiss banks after the scandal surrounding dormant Jewish accounts. “In that year alone we reaped another 400,000 names, the response was amazing,” said Mr Shalev. He says the centre is on the brink of a similar reaction. “If we get another half-million in as few months it will be outstanding.

“But I hope and believe that within two or three years of the internet launch we shall add another one and a half million names. Remember, there are no tombstones. The Nazis intended to obliterate the entire Jewish race, even their memory. That is why gathering each and every name is so vital, because behind each one is a whole and real life.”

The site says: “This is a race against time — we must redeem as many names as possible before the generation that remembers them is no longer with us.”

The launch coincides with a $100 million (£54 million) remodelling of the 45-acre site in Jerusalem which includes monuments such as the Hall of Remembrance, the Valley of the Communities and the Children’s Memorial.

Mr Shalev said that Yad Vashem hopes to return to the days of the late 1990s, when more than two million people visited the centre annually. The Palestinian intifida has reduced visitor numbers by half, but figures are climbing once more. The Hall of Names, a cavern hewn out of solid rock at the bottom of which lies a reflective pool of water, will soon echo to the chant of prayers for the dead, offered by those without the grave of a loved one to visit.

You can find the website at: www.yadvashem.org

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