Searching the database

Searching the database of the WARRIOR’S NAME project will be available when the information from our project’s PDF books is entered into the electronic database. Currently, these books contain information about 160,000 dead Jewish soldiers.
The process of data entry will take a long time, as it is accompanied by the verification of information from online archives. Wherever possible, national identification is clarified. Let us demonstrate this on the example of one surname.
In the chapter «Methodological Issues» there is an example of a search on the surname Jaffe. It shows why only one warrior out of two dead warriors with the surname Jaffe is included in our database.
There was no record of this surname in the PDF book, based on the Electronic Book of Remembrance.

In the Book of the new names (2023) we have included such an entry:

And now we suggest comparing how the warrior’s page looks like when the information is transferred to the Database of our project.

The database, unlike the Book of Remembrance, allows

1) To see the documents of the warrior.

2) Search by input fields. So, we can gather all soldiers born in this city, or soldiers who served in the same division.

3) Sometimes we can describe the feat of the warrior for which he was awarded. In the case of Jaffe, this is a description of the battle in which he was killed.

4) Search by tags. In this case, you can select warriors who were awarded postmortal for their heroism. This database will provide great opportunities for museum staff, for school teachers.

5) There is a button for feedback on the warrior’s page. The visitors can ask a question about the soldier’s biography or provide additional information. There is also a button to light a memorial candle.

Project team

The WARRIOR’S NAME project was founded and developed by a group of its initiators. All types of work were carried out exclusively on a volunteer basis. But the range of tasks and the amount of information are huge. The development of the project will require the collective efforts of a large number of participants. We are inviting people to join the project team.

How to participate in the project

The WARRIOR’S NAME project was founded and developed by a group of its initiators. All types of work were carried out exclusively on a volunteer basis. But the range of tasks and the amount of information are huge. The development of the project will require the collective efforts of a large number of participants.

We address to the state institutions, to public organizations, to the Jewish foundations, to private persons — with an appeal to join to realization of the project, so important for preservation of heritage of the Jewish people.

Below we list several options for participation in the development of the project.

• We invite people to join the search team of our project. We will clearly instruct and train a new member of the team how to search for materials about Jewish soldiers, how to enter new names into the database.
• We invite people as well as representatives of volunteer organizations to participate in filling out the Electronic Database. At present, the project’s 66 PDF books contain summarized information about 160,000 fallen soldiers. This information should be transferred into an electronic form, which will be reflected online on the project website.
• We invite specialists in the field of IT-technologies and web-design to assist in the development of the project website.
• We invite specialists in social networks help us to distribute information about the project in Jewish communities of those countries where descendants of the participants of the war live.
• We invite researchers, familiar with the topic of documentation of Jewish warriors in the Allies countries (USA, Canada, Britain, France, Poland, etc.).
• We invite employees of government agencies, public organizations, Jewish foundations, as well as private sponsors, help to create a budget for the development of the project and for the enlargement of the team of participants.

Methodology issues

In the process of including the names of deceased soldiers in the project database, three key questions must be answered:

• How reliable is the information about the soldier’s death? This problem usually applies to the «Missing in Action» record.
• How to determine whether different accounts in the online archives of military documentation refer to the same person, which are similar, but slightly different in the spelling of the name?
• How can we determine a warrior’s national identification when including him in the Jewish Book of Remembrance?
  

On this page will be presented actual materials, showing on concrete examples, how the participants of the search group of the project NAME OF WARRIOR solve such problems.

In the process of search work we have to face difficult questions:

• How can we determine the nationality of a warrior if several documents, including award documents, contain different information?

• What indirect signs in the documents can be used to identify the nationality of a soldier?

• How to search for information about a soldier’s relatives if there is no other way to determine nationality?

• In what cases should the entry «Missing in Action» be especially carefully double-checked?

• How can the region of a soldier’s death be determined if it is not listed in military documents?

We hope that the techniques and methods of solving search problems, which we will show on concrete examples from our work experience, can be used by our colleagues studying various aspects of the topic of Jewish participation in the war.

Planned results of the project

The WARRIOR’S NAME project is dedicated to the memorialization of Jewish participants in the Second World War. We believe that its realization should lead to the achievement of two specific goals.

1. An electronic resource, the Jewish Warriors Database, will create a space of remembrance. Family members of warriors, their descendants will have the opportunity to light a memorial candle on the site on commemorative dates, on Yortzeit anniversaries, to honor the memory of their relative, a war participant. This is an important element of Jewish tradition.
2. Honoring the memory of Jewish soldiers should have not only a virtual but also a visible image. It should have not only a family and personal, but also a national format.
   The participants of the WARRIOR’S NAME project believe that the result of their activities will be the possibility of creating a HALL OF NAMES OF DECEASED JEWISH WARRIORS in one of Israel’s museums.
   Its information content will be the materials collected during the creation of the Project’s Database. The Hall of the Names should receive the visual and sound design corresponding to the theme. Lists of the names of fallen soldiers and their photos will be projected on its walls. Tens of thousands of soldiers’ photos will be continuously changing each other.
   The Second World War brought incalculable disasters to the Jewish people. Like any war, it had two sides: heroic and tragic. The tragic side of history is reflected in the exposition of the Yad Vashem Memorial, the core of which is the Hall of Names. The creation of a similar memorial space, the HALL OF NAMES OF DECEASED WARRIORS, will be an important contribution to the preservation and transmission to future generations of the Jewish people of the memory of their fathers and grandfathers, who suffered such terrible hardships. The HALL OF THE WARRIORS NAMES will be a part of the preservation of the heritage of the Jewish people.

The project perspectives

Speaking about the current stage of work on the creation the database of fallen Jewish soldiers, and about the nearest prospects, let us emphasize a few features.

1. In the future, as the project progresses, its organizers intend to expand the base with one more large section: information about Jewish war veterans who met the Victory. Their number amounted to about 300 thousand people. Many of them were lucky to live a long life, some of them made Aliyah to Israel at the end of their lives, where their families now live. At present, descendants of war veterans live in all countries of the former Soviet Union, in Europe and America. We believe that many of them will consider it their duty and honor to send information about their fathers and grandfathers to perpetuate the memory of them in printed and electronic Books of Memory and reference books. The structure of the Unified Database of the WARRIOR’S NAME Project allows to realize such an ambitious task.
2. As well as creating a database of Soviet Jewish soldiers, it is necessary to work on collecting data on Jewish soldiers of the Allies of World War II. This search has specifics for each country, as there are specific features of each country’s military documentation. Nevertheless, our projects’ database format allows us to include sections with materials on Jews in the armies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, France — all the Allied countries. Thus, in the future the database of the project THE WARRIOR’S NAME will also become a reflection and evidence of the fact that during the Second World War there was a united Jewish people living in different countries of the world, and this people took an active part in the struggle against German fascism.

The сurrent stage of the project development

The logical continuation of this work was the move to the third stage of the project’s implementation — the creation of the Unified Database of Jewish soldiers who died during the Second World War.

At present, it includes about 160,000 names and continues to be updated daily. The fields of the database form reflect biographical information about the soldier, his place of conscription, military specialty, rank, and last place of service. In those cases where it is possible, the warrior’s combat path is reflected: names of fronts, major battles.

Indication of the date and place of death of the soldier, the place of his burial plays an invaluable role for the families of the descendants of the fallen soldiers. Since in a number of cases the participants of the project manage to conduct an independent investigation on the documents and find out details about the date and place of death, it will allow the descendants to fulfill the commandment of commemoration of the dead relatives, which is an important element of the Jewish tradition.

Nowadays very wide possibilities of online access to the archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, to the «Memorial» database, to online collections of photos of soldiers allow through the database of our project and through the corresponding hyperlinks to see the award list, the card of the Military Transfer Station, the statement of losses, the death notice, the document of the military commissariat about the post-war search of the missing person, the sheet of testimonies in the Yad Vashem Memorial.

In including names in the database, project participants have to deal with the delicate problem of national identification. We usually see a lack of documentation and detailed biographical information. In the section «Methodology Issues» you can see how this problem is solved by the project participants.

Speaking about the current stage of work on the creation the database of fallen Jewish soldiers, and about the nearest prospects, let us emphasize a few features.

1. The database is at the stage of formation. Among 160 thousand accounts created in it, not more than 10% are filled with information on most of the declared fields of the form. Progress in this matter can be significantly accelerated only by expanding the number of project participants. We address to state institutions, public organizations, Jewish foundations with a request to assist in solving this issue.
2. Experience demonstrates that during a year of search work it is possible to establish and enter into the database up to several thousand names of soldiers who were previously missing from Jewish printed and electronic Books of Remembrance. In this way, it will be possible to gradually bring the number of accounts in the database of the dead closer to the figure of 200,000 dead Jewish soldiers, which is recorded on the Memorial in Jerusalem.  The methodology of the project is well suited to accomplish this task. The only condition for this task is to find certain resources, including organizational resources, to expand the team of project participants.
3. At the moment, the database is focused exclusively on finding the names of fallen soldiers and establishing information about them. In the future it is planned to create thematic pages in the database, devoted to different aspects of military history: awarding Jews with high orders, participation in decisive battles, representation in different branches of the army, collections of materials on specific military specialties, on feats performed. The thematic pages will be a valuable aid for historians and teachers of educational institutions in the preparation of memorial events, lectures and lessons.
4. Another additional function, which is expected to be realized in the database in the future, will be the ability to make selections on the basis of territory. We assume that this function will be in demand by Jewish communities of different regions of the former USSR, as it will allow to collect information about Jewish soldiers who were born in this city, or who joined the army there, or who died in battles on the territory of this region.

Project history

The materials presented in the database of the WARRIOR’S NAME project reflect the work of searchers and historians for a quarter of a century.  At the origins of this activity stood Russian CEIVV (Union of Jewish Invalids and War Veterans), which published a printed Book of Memory in Russia since the second half of the 90s (11 volumes, about 5 thousand names in each volume).

These materials, as well as information from numerous regional Books of Memory and documents sent by searchers, were reflected in the ELECTRONIC BOOK OF MEMORY, created for twenty years by our colleague Alexander Zaslavsky (Israel). (We have described the biography of Alexander Lvovich, who passed away in 2023). In order to preserve the results of his many years of labor, the members of the searching group WARRIOR’S NAME PROJECT transformed all the collected materials into the format of PDF-books (66 volumes). These books are presented online on our website.

А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Э Ю Я

Project tasks

The task of the WARRIOR’S NAME project is to preserve the memory of Jewish soldiers who participated in World War II. At present, the efforts of the project participants are focused on creating the most complete database of fallen soldiers — those who perished, died of wounds and illnesses, and went missing. The monument erected in Jerusalem on Mount Herzl has the title: «Memorial to the 200,000 fallen Jewish soldiers».

The principle of «No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten», which is sacred to the generation of descendants, is not always realized in practice. The nature of military operations during the Second World War, as well as the peculiarities of military personnel records, led to the fact that the fates of several million soldiers of the Red Army, among them many Jews, remain unknown. They are listed as missing soldiers, and sometimes even the names of them are not reflected in the available archival documents and memorial books.

Feeling a special personal responsibility for finding out the fates of Jewish soldiers, we, participants the project, proclaim the thesis: Each of the fallen and missing soldiers had the name. It is the task and responsibility of our generation to find out these names and the available information about the fates of the soldiers.