MARCH 22-23, 2012 

Father Patrick Desbois

Naples Lecture: March 22nd St. John the Evangelist's Parish Life Center 6-9PM
FGCU Interfaith Seminar: Sugden Hospitality March 23rd 10 AM-2PM
On Campus Lecture: TBA

Father Patrick Desbois, president of Yahad-In Unum, has devoted his life to confronting anti-Semitism and furthering Catholic-Jewish understanding. Since 2001, he has led a truly historic undertaking of identifying and locating undiscovered mass graves of Jews killed during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. In less than three years, from June 1941, when Germany invaded the former Soviet Union, until the spring of 1944, Nazi mobile killing units, or Einsatzgruppen, massacred well over 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Europe. The Jewish populations of whole villages were slaughtered in hours; entire regions were annihilated in an afternoon. As distinct from the concentration camps, there were few survivors to tell the world what had happened. So that history may not be forgotten, Father Desbois, a Catholic Priest, conducts his work by first having Yahad-In Unum researchers carefully review war archives in the former Soviet Union, Germany and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. With this information, Father Desbois and his teams visit small villages across Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Belarus and interview the residents there who witnessed the killings. His book, The Holocaust by Bullets, published by Palgrave-Macmillan, documents his findings and is the winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award. Fluent in 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 Yeshiva University amongst other honors.