JERUSALEM, ISRAEL.- 200 British, Australian and South African students in Israel for their gap year will be at Yad Vashem, Friday, January 21, 2005 for a pre-launch event of the 60 Days for 60 Years Project. The project, organized by Tribe UK in partnership with Yad Vashem, aims to commemorate Holocaust victims and coincides with the 60 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

Participants in the project will study one topic ranging from “Why do bad things happen to good people” to “Remembering the people behind the names,” every day for 60 days - a day for a year- in memory of a person that perished in the Holocaust. They will study from a pocket book that has been produced by Tribe, containing sixty questions about contemporary Jewish life with answers by rabbis and leading scholars across the Jewish world. Each participant will receive a card on which will be the name and hometown of a Holocaust victim in whose memory they will be studying. The names, provided by Yad Vashem, can be found on the recently launched Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names at www.yadvashem.org. The Central Database contains some 3 million names of Holocaust victims. Participants will be encouraged to access the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names to investigate the lives of those individuals whose memories they will be commemorating, as well as to investigate whether their own families had relatives who perished in the Holocaust.

On January 25th, the project will be officially launched in London. It will continue until March 25th 2005, the Jewish holiday Purim, 60 days later.

On Friday, the students will take part in an educational tour of Yad Vashem prior to the event, which will feature a presentation on the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names as well as remarks from the noted historian Rabbi Berel Wein. The pre-launch event will take place in the Lecture Hall of the International School for Holocaust Studies.