Yahad-In Unum (YIU) was founded in Paris in 2004 by leaders in the French Catholic and Jewish communities. Its primary initiative is to locate the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, in Ukraine and Belarus. YIU is led by Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic Priest whose grandfather was a French soldier deported to the Nazi prison camp Rava-Ruska, located in a Ukrainian town that borders Poland. Its American fundraising branch is the American Friends of Yahad-In Unum.
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Father Patrick Desbois is the Director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism. His work on Catholic-Jewish relations has frequently received international recognition; he has received the Légion d'honneur from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and been awarded the Medal of Valor by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Roger E. Joseph Prize by Hebrew Union College, the Humanitarian Award by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jan Karski Award by the American Jewish Committee, the B'nai B'rith International Award for Outstanding Contributions to Relations with the Jewish People and the National Jewish Book Award for his 2008 book Holocaust by Bullets (Palgrave-Macmillan). In spring 2009, he received honorary doctorates from Hebrew University and Bar Ilan.
Dr. Richard Prasquier is the Vice-President of the Yahad-In Unum Board. He is the President of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions and a member of the World Jewish Congress and the International Jewish Committee on Inter-religious Consultations.
David Black is the President of American Friends of Yahad-In Unum. Black is the Associate Vice President for Institutional Advancement for Yeshiva University. He is the former director of the JCC in Manhattan and executive director of the Alliance Francaise in New York.
In less than two years, from June 1941 until the spring of 1943, an estimated 1.25 million Jews were massacred in the Soviet Union by Nazi mobile killing units, or Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen rounded up the Jewish populations of the villages and towns they passed through, led them to the country-side and summarily executed them. The victims were buried (many of them still alive) in mass graves. Very little is known about these atrocities because there were so few survivors.[1][2]
Yahad-In Unum's seeks to find evidence of the massacres on the Eastern front and locate the mass graves of Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen. YIU's objective is to counter the claims of Holocaust deniers who use the lack of official documentation of the murders to make claims about the validity of Holocaust evidence, and to account for the graves that remain undiscovered to pay respect to the dead.
YIU approaches its work on two fronts—archival research and research trips. The archival research is primarily undertaken by PhD and graduate students in the United States and Germany. The researchers spend several months at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, where they study the Soviet archives of the Extraordinary State Commission of 1944 and the archives from the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Ludwigsburg, Germany.
After the research is complete, an 11 person team, usually led by Patrick Desbois, travels to Belarus and Ukraine to collect testimonial and forensic evidence of the murders. Each trip lasts 15–20 days. The team includes a photographer, ballistics expert, translators, drivers, daily report recorders, a witness interviewer and camera operator. During each trip, the team travels from village to village, where they interview and film the surviving eyewitnesses, using testimony of witnesses to discover the locations of the graves. Once the graves are located, the team uses high-tech equipment to obtain forensic evidence that validates the testimonies. When the team returns to Paris, the translated video testimony and the physical evidence is archived.
In August 2008, Palgrave MacMillan published Holocaust By Bullets, written by Father Desbois about the work of YIU. Father Desbois titled the book after the method the Nazis used to kill their victims. The Jewish Book Council awarded the book the 2008 National Jewish Book Award.
YIU continues to work in Ukraine and Belarus and plans to expand to Russia and Poland. They also plan to open a unique research center in Paris, which will feature a unique archival resource center, and the new results from Father Desbois' field research, including video testimonies and artifacts.
In addition, YIU is planning to bring a special touring exhibit to schools in Ukraine. YIU will also continue the global tour of its educational exhibits, which include trainings and public education programs. Finally, they plan to host a conference at the Sorbonne about Aktion 1005, the Nazi's attempts to erase evidence of the mass murder of Jews.