HEAD OF THE UGCCDIOCESES AND EXARCHATESCHURCH AND SOCIETYSPIRITUALITYSOCIALITYECUMENISMLIVE PARISH The Head of the UGCC met with Father Patrick Desbois, a Holocaust researcher in Ukraine and Eastern Europe Friday, 09 April 2021, 15:22 On April 9, 2021, His Beatitude Sviatoslav received Fr. Patrick Desbois, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church who has devoted his life to Holocaust research, especially in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. Father Desbois is the president of Yahad - In Unum, a global humanitarian organization, which he founded in 2004. Its work focuses on identifying mass executions of Jews and Roma in Eastern Europe during World War II, as well as combating anti-Semitism and improving relations between Catholics and Jews.
A professor at Georgetown University, Father Desbois works at the Program for Jewish Civilization. He is also the former director of the Episcopal Committee on Catholic-Jewish Relations under the auspices of the French Conference of Bishops (from 1999 to 2016). Father Desbois is the author of The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. Today, he is also investigating the Yazidi genocide in Iraq.
In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois first documented the killing of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the use of modern forensic practice on long-hidden mass graves. Nearly a decade of further work by Yahad-In-Unum, based on interviews with 5,000 Jewish neighbors, led to startling new findings about the scale and nature of the genocide.
During the meeting, Father Desbois expressed his sincere gratitude to His Beatitude Sviatoslav for the assistance of the UGCC priests in his research in the late 1990s and for facilitating the communication with witnesses of those tragic events. The Head of the UGCC emphasized the need to commemorate in our country the genocides that took place on the territory of Ukraine. He said that it is a proper and worthy way both to honor the victims of totalitarian regimes and to heal the national memory.