Yad Vashem Using AI To Preserve Memory Of Holocaust Victims

Israel’s national Holocaust museum Yad Vashem has begun using artificial intelligence to preserve the memories and stories of the victims of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews. 

The new system uses natural language processing (NLP), which allows computers to understand human language, and generative AI, which creates videos and images. 

This allows Yad Vashem staff to go through data about the Holocaust that it has gathered over the past 70 years – including a reported 224 million pages of documents, over 500,000 images and some 135,000 written, video and audio testimonies – and put names, stories and documents together. 

“[With] NLP and generative AI we are bringing victim memories and their stories once lost, back to life,” said the museum. 

The AI platform found, for example, an apparent wedding photo of Paula Tischkowski, who perished in the Auschwitz death camp in 1942. The photo had been misplaced among the half a million images in the Yad Vashem archives.

The museum is also using named-entity recognition (NER) to identify people and places, including concentration camps and ghettos, mentioned in witness testimonies. Some 1.2 million of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust have yet to be formally identified. 

“Our commitment to utilizing cutting-edge technology gains even greater significance due to the unparalleled wealth of historical documentation housed within our archives, which stands as the world’s largest documentation of Holocaust-related records,” said Yad Vashem spokesperson Simmy Allen, according to JNS.

“The sheer magnitude of this archival treasure trove necessitates an innovative approach to data processing that would be nearly impossible to uncover manually. In this endeavor, technology serves as a powerful ally.”