Tuesday is Yom haShoah, Israel and the Jewish world’s annual day of remembrance of the Holocaust.
It’s become our tradition each year to remember the names — to post images of Holocaust memorials that personalize the victims, emphasizing that each of the vast number of people who were murdered was an individual — a person, not a number. Naming names keeps alive the memory of those who were murdered — and of the living Jewish worlds, stretching back generations, that were destroyed.
It is estimated that there may be more than 10,000 Holocaust Memorial Monuments (HMMs) around the world — ranging from name lists, to simple plaques, to sculptural monuments, to huge memorial sites that combine elements such as sculpture, land art, and exhibitions.
As we have noted in the past, a project launched in 2022 — the worldwide Holocaust Memorial Monument (HMM) Database — is trying to keep track, via a growing online database that can be accessed via the Center for Jewish Art web site. Its purpose is to collect and organize systematic information on the history and art of Holocaust commemoration by monuments
To date, around 3,000 Holocaust memorials have been entered into the database — the largest known body of information on HMMs worldwide.
You can search for monuments by Location, Type, Setting, Artist, Iconographical subject, Textual content, and Completion date, and there is an extensive bibliography.
The HMMD is a partnership project of the Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies/The George Feldenkreis Program in Judaic Studies, University of Miami, Florida; and the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, Syracuse, New York. (JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber is on the international Advisory Committee.)
During 2025, organizers said in a progress report released for Yom haShoah, a substantial number of new entries were added from Austria, Belarus, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, the United States, and South America. In Israel, documentation included 400 monuments in the Holon Cemetery and the Chamber of the Holocaust in Jerusalem. Additional monuments were catalogued in the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Poland, and Slovakia.
Work on the HMM database has progressed through partnerships with a number of institutions, foundations, organizations, and individuals and research will continue this year.
The HMM Database demonstrates the wide range of forms through which the Holocaust has been commemorated, including plaques, inscribed stones, sculptures, architectural complexes, and installations. The HMM database carefully records monument locations, transcribes inscriptions in their original languages with English translations, and provides detailed descriptions of artistic and architectural design and iconography.
HMMs have been erected both at sites of destruction and in communities far removed from the events of the Holocaust, where victims and histories are nevertheless remembered. Many HMMs were initiated by survivors, descendants, and Jewish communities. Since the 1990s, governments and public institutions have also commissioned major national HMMs in cities such as Vienna, Bucharest, Ottawa and, most recently, Amsterdam (2025).
In recent years, there has been a growing number of HMMss dedicated to specific victim groups — including children, women, and partisans — as well as HMMs honoring non-Jewish victims targeted by the Nazis, including Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with disabilities. The HMM database includes many of these memorials, offering a broader and more nuanced view of Holocaust remembrance than is typically found in general surveys.
For further information on the HMM project — or find out how to take part in the research — contact: [email protected]
Click to read the full HMM Database progress report as a PDF
Click here to access the HMM database