There is a terrible irony about Yad Vashem. It is perhaps the most beautiful spot in all of Yerushalayim. From its northern edge the Jerusalem Forest spreads out like a green blanket. The valley below beckons for song the shimmering houses of Beit Zayit dot the hills like pearls. But in the stone and wood buildings of this place the Jewish People keep their most horrifying memories. Seventy-six years ago one man set out to destroy us. The names of the kedoshim of the Holocaust are memorialized here engraved in stone illuminated by fire. The buildings echo with silence. The pictures the stories the horribleness of it all bring nausea. And yet on a cool summer day high up in those hills just a few hundred feet from those mausoleums of death the wind whistles through the trees the air refreshes the silence as welcome as it is rare in the busy capital. In one of these buildings just off the main road and through a second security gate Sara Berkowitz sits down to work. It has been her job for the last eight years to collect the names of the dead specifically the kedoshim of the Torah community of Europe. Along with a team of eleven Berkowitz and her colleagues visit shuls and graveyards and pore through books copying names off tombstones reading every memorial plaque in every shul from Metula to Eilat scanning book dedications. L’illui nishmas. Please don’t forget me. I once had another wife and another family. So far they have collected over 800 000 names part of a wider outreach effort begun byYadVashem in 2004 to finish documenting the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Since the count began in 1953 whenYadVashem was established it has managed to confirm the names of 4.5 million individuals.Mrs.Berkowitz and her colleagues labor in a building that more resembles a well-endowed modern library than a repository of names: sleek lines cool stone neat cubicles in a well-ordered floor plan. As outside there is a coolness of spirit in these walls a certain somberness that light doesn’t penetrate.