Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn called for efforts Monday to support the reunions of hundreds of thousands of families separated for decades across the Korean Peninsula by the 1950-53 Korean War.
  

"The confirmation of life and death of all the members of the families, as well as exchanges of letters, regular meetings and hometown visits, should be made," Hwang told a ceremony commemorating the registration of a decades-old local TV program, which sought to reunite those families, to UNESCO's documentary heritage list last week.
  

In 1983, the country's public broadcaster KBS aired a live television show titled "Search for Separated Families," aimed at reuniting the family members who had been separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.
  

The program was to be a one-time special broadcast, but positive responses from the public prompted it to last for 138 days in a row, resulting in 10,189 successful reunions.
  
"The registration is more meaningful in that the two Koreas are waiting for the reunions next Tuesday," Hwang said.

Last month, South and North Korea agreed to hold the reunions for 100 separated family members from each side from Oct. 20-26 at a scenic resort on Mount Kumgang on the North's east coast.
  

The issue of the separated families is one of the most pressing humanitarian matters on the peninsula, as about half of the estimated 129,700 South Korean applicants for the reunions have died.
  

In the decision made by the International Advisory Committee of the UNESCO Memory of the World, 20,552 materials related to the show and a set of Korea's Confucian printing woodblocks, comprised of 64,226 pages of 718 kinds of books written by scholars during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) were also included.
  

The designation of the two brought the total number of South Korea's heritage items on the list to 13, which includes the Hunminjeongeum Manuscript, the original manuscript of the Korean alphabet.
  

"We can be more proud of ourselves in that we have the largest number registered on the list in Asia," Hwang said.
  

The Memory of the World program, established in 1992, seeks to protect and record the world's valuable documents and widen public access to them through the Internet. (Yonhap)