Yad Vashem - Preserving holocaust history

Music The Holocaust took place according to our definition from '33 to '45, until the end of the war. One-third of the Jewish people was murdered. And the -- the centers of Jewish life for hundreds of years and creativity was totally destroyed, almost totally destroyed. Music Most of the survivors who emigrate to Israel after the Second World War came from central and eastern part of Europe. Yad Vashem is our national authority which deals with all the aspects of Holocaust remembrance, research, documentation, and education. It was founded by a special law of our parliament, the Knesset, in '53. The Yad Vashem archives are the largest in the world. We have the largest collection of documentation about the Holocaust. We have today, 154 million pages of documentation. We have 420,000 photographs. We have more than 112,000 testimonies etc. Our main effort in the beginning is to preserve the items that we have for generations to come. And therefore, we have an excellent preservation/conservation lab. And we are treating them very gently and with a lot of honor, in order to keep them as they are and prevent the damage. The point of Yad Vashem is to make that information accessible to as wide a public as possible, to know about what actually happened in the Holocaust. And therefore, about the last 10 years, we've been digitizing everything. We're around the three quarters of petabyte. If we try to put it into something a bit more understandable, it's about 300 million files -- digital files already stored on our storage operation. And every day we add more and more. EMC's been involved with Yad Vashem for a number of years. And so when I had the first conversations, I realized that it was a much more sophisticated operation and one that was going to grow in capabilities over the years. So in order to do that, they had to have a contemporary online system, and they wanted to make it available to everybody in the world. This means that we need everything online at the same speed, and this is really something which is different from many institutions. But more than that, it showed that a large company like EMC, understood the importance of an institution like Yad Vashem, and has helped us in many ways. So it's been a good relationship, and it still is. The documents that we are collecting are important for a lot of audiences. It is important for research. It is important for commemoration. It is important for education, but it is important for the regular person in the street. Family members want to know what happened to their, eh, beloved ones. During the years we found information about, eh, people who didn't know that their relatives are still alive. And it is something that gives us the strength to come to work every day. Yad Vashem is representing the -- the information and the history of my grandfather and his grandfather because most of the Israeli coming from Europe struggle. As EMC employee -- we are very proud that all the testimonials and all the data, the most important data in the world, will be on EMC. Music I think that for us today, 60 and 70 years after the Holocaust, the ability to connect ourselves to the story is by looking into someone's face and, try to understand what happened to him, whom was he before the war, what happened to him during the war, and why. When I enter to the Yad Vashem archives, I always feel that behind each paper here, there are people. And by connecting those pieces of information we are giving back the lives and the faces of those people who do not have anyone who may commemorate them or even know that they existed. I would hope that people walk away from Yad Vashem and say, I hope something like this never happens again. That's the message. For me, that's the message. Music