In July of 2023, The Holocaust Committee of The Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery received an Ignite Impact Grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester to create an online, comprehensive, community-wide database of all Holocaust survivors that settled in the Rochester, NY region. This was not an original idea, but rather built on the work that had been started more than 35 years before by the Jewish Community Center of Rochester in creating a Holocaust Memorial Garden, including a wall with the engraved names of Rochester Holocaust survivors. Originally the JCC intended to digitize and keep all Holocaust media on a computer overlooking the garden. By the late 1990s the internet became the favored tool for doing research, so the information from the JCC computer was transferred to a website that could be accessed by all, hosted by the Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI), a division of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester.

Over time, other lists of Rochester Holocaust survivors were created, such as the Photo Essay Series (started in 1996) at Monroe Community College’s Holocaust Genocide and Human Rights Project (HGHRP) and the Mount Hope Holocaust Archive (started in 2021) on The Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery website (FOMH). Each listing told the stories of some Rochester Holocaust survivors, with much overlap among them. No one database told the complete story. And so, with the support of the Director of CHAI and the Director of HGHRP, the Holocaust Committee of FOMH undertook combining, streamlining, and making more complete one community-wide database. This is the starting point for this project. More names have been added to those already known through both research and interviews with survivor families. This new database still requires much research to tell the stories of all the survivors, but basic information is available for each survivor, including date of birth, location of birth, date of death (if appropriate) and burial location.