Yad Vashem announced on Tuesday December 21st that it had identified two thirds of the Jews murdered in the holocaust, a total of 4 million names thus far. Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev, stated that during the last decade, the museum's staff has traced some 1.5 million names and added them to the database. He also stated that the Germans sought not only to destroy the Jews, but also to erase their memory, thus the mission of identifying all the names is especially difficult because entire families were wiped out and document were destroyed during the Nazi genocide.