About Our Speaker
Father Patrick Desbois
Father Patrick Desbois, a Roman Catholic priest from France, has pioneered the application of modern forensic research methods to the study of the Holocaust. As founder and president of Yahad-In Unum, a global humanitarian organization dedicated to identifying and commemorating the sites of Jewish and Roma mass executions in Eastern Europe during World War II, he has devoted his life to confronting anti-Semitism and furthering Catholic-Jewish understanding.
Since 2001, Father Desbois has led a truly historic undertaking ofidentifying and locating undiscovered mass graves of Jews killed during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. He conducts his work by first having Yahad-In Unumresearchers carefully review the war archives in the former Soviet Union, Germany and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. With this information, Father Desbois and his team visit small villages across Ukraine and Eastern Europe and interviewthe residents there who witnessed the killings. To further refute the claims of Holocaust deniers, artifacts are collected at each site and most significantly, video testimonies are recorded from eyewitnesses. These testimonies are archived inYahad-In Unum’s Paris headquarters and are shared with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent collection. His work was featured in 2015 on60 Minutes in a segment titled “The Hidden Holocaust.”
Father Desbois is the inaugural holder of the Braman Endowed Professorship of the Practice of the Forensic Study of the Holocaust at Georgetown University. He is also the director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism, and serves as a consultant to the Vatican on relations with Judaism. Father Desbois’ book, The Holocaust by Bullets, documents his findings and is the winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award. Fluent in French, Hebrew and English, Father Desbois was awarded the Medal of Valor by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Humanitarian Award of the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Honorary Doctorates from Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University in Israel, and in May 2011, Yeshiva University, amongst other honors.
