Memory of the Past and the Battle for a Promising Future

Lecture Admission: $15 YIVO members & students: $10 Watch the video

Father Patrick Desbois is the founder and president of Yahad-In Unum, a Georgetown University professor, and a human rights activist. He has devoted his life to fighting the bigotry that fuels the disease of genocide and to bridging the divide between faiths. For nearly fifteen years, with his Yahad-In Unum team, he has led a truly historic undertaking of identifying and locating undiscovered mass graves of Jews and Roma killed during the Holocaust by Bullets in Eastern Europe. Join us to hear Father Desbois discuss Yahad-In Unum’s mission of investigating the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, Poland…, and of bringing back the memory of the forgotten victims of this hidden chapter of Holocaust history. 

Since 2015, as a part of their continued effort to uncover genocidal practices around the world, Father Desbois and Yahad-In Unum have been gathering testimony from Yazidi survivors of the ISIS crimes perpetrated in Iraq and Syria, and helping their uneasy turn back into society through psychological and humanitarian aid. Father Desbois will also discuss the details of this modern genocide and the legacy of the Holocaust by Bullets today. 

About the Speaker

Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest and the President and Founder of Yahad-In Unum. He was also, from 2001 to 2016, the Director of the National Service for Relations with Judaism, under the auspices of the French Conference of Bishops and, since 2003, consultant to the Holy See Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism.

In 2016, Father Desbois was named the Braman Endowed Professor of the Practice of the Forensic Study of the Holocaust at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Grandson of a French deportee to the Rava Ruska camp (today located in Ukraine), he has been leading YIU since its founding in 2004 as its teams race to identify the mass graves of Jews, Roma, and other victims killed in mass shootings by the Nazis in Eastern Europe during WWII.

In 2015, he started collecting evidence on the Yazidi genocide perpetrated by ISIS, by interviewing more than 110 survivors in Iraqi Kurdistan.

About Yahad-In Unum

In 2004, Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest, created Yahad-In Unum (“Together in One” in Hebrew and Latin) to reveal the details of the Holocaust by Bullets, identify the killing sites, and preserve the GPS coordinates of the unmarked graves of 2.2 million Jews killed in Eastern Europe.

To date, YIU has conducted research investigations of more than 2,100 execution sites and has gathered more than 5,200 videotaped testimonies of eyewitnesses to the crime during the course of more than 120 research trips in 8 countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Lithuania, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).