Patrick Desbois

The Holy Father encourages the members of ‘Yahad-In Unum’ to continue their struggle for the just recognition of the violence suffered by so many men and women belonging to different communities.

Patrick Desbois' book reflecting the work of Action Yazidis (with Costel Nastasie: The Terrorist Factory - ISIS, the Yazidi Genocide, and Exporting Terror) was published in 2018.

In July 2017, Pope Francis sent a blessing and a message of encouragement to Father Desbois and Yahad - In Unum, writing:

French president Emmanuel Macron praised his work in November 2017:

Action Yazidis is led by Patrick Desbois and collects the words of survivors to document and offer evidence of every step of the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL. Father Desbois was interviewed in Sinjar in 2016 by Lara Logan on an episode of 60 Minutes. Until July 2018, nearly 300 semi-directive interviews of Yazidi victims of all ages were conducted by Desbois and his team.

Between 2015 and 2016, he has been teaching at the Program for Jewish Civilization in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University as an adjunct professor. Since 2016 he is the inaugural holder of the Braman Endowed Professorship of the Practice of the Forensic Study of the Holocaust at the Center for Jewish Civilization.

Desbois conducts many of the interviews with the witnesses himself (and with translators). Using metal detectors, Desbois and his team have unearthed German cartridges and bullets from the pits where bodies were thrown, as well as jewellery belonging to the victims. Criticisms leveled against Father Desbois include his acceptance of the confessions of complicity in war crimes by those whom he interviews. "Desbois doesn't ask a lot of the people that he speaks with... He gives the impression that it was the Germans doing all the killing, but in fact much of the organization of the genocide had a lot to do with auxiliary and local police forces. He is not interested in that", Professor Omer Bartov has stated. Paul Shapiro of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has countered that "Some people have been critical of his methodology, but no one else is going out and doing this kind of work. It is easy to be critical; it is much harder to have the drive, stamina and commitment to go again and again to these places." In March 2014,

His work has been sanctioned by the Pope, recognized and encouraged by the President of France and supported in Europe and the United States. Desbois has been internationally recognized for his extraordinary efforts; his awards include 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 Contribution to Relations with the Jewish People and more recently, the National Jewish Book Award for his 2008 book Holocaust by Bullets (Palgrave-Macmillan). In 2013, he received the LBJ Moral Courage Award from the Holocaust Museum Houston.

In 2004, he joined leaders in the French Catholic and Jewish community in founding Yahad-In Unum ("together" in Latin and in Hebrew.) The organization's purpose is to further relations between Catholics and Jews. Its largest and most ambitious initiative is to locate the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, in the former Soviet republics and Eastern bloc.

In order to right the egregious wrong, Father Desbois helped found Yahad-In Unum in 2004. The organization collects information about the mass killing of Jews and Roma in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania between 1941 and 1944. Local contemporary witnesses are interviewed about the mass shootings which took place next to their home and the mass graves are located. Desbois estimates that there are no less than 1 million victims buried in 1,200 graves in Ukraine.

As a consequence of his childhood interests, Father Desbois studied the Jewish faith while preparing for his ordination as a Catholic priest. He studied anti-semitism at Yad-Vashem, and later Jewish religion and culture with Dr Charles Favre, a leader in the French Jewish community. In 2002, he traveled to Ukraine, so he could see where his grandfather had been imprisoned during the war, and to pay respects at a memorial to the lives lost. Upon his arrival, he was shocked to discover that there existed not a single marking or commemoration to 1.25 million Jewish victims in all of Ukraine and Belarus. Speaking of his initial experience, Desbois narrated how:

In 2002, while traveling in Ukraine, he visited the site of his grandfather's imprisonment, Rawa-Ruska. Desbois knew that before World War II more than 15,000 Jews had lived in the town, but when he asked to see where they had been murdered, the mayor brushed him off and said no one knew anything about it. "How could more than 10,000 Jews be killed in the village and nobody knows?" he says. "I knew I needed to find out what happened. So I came back two times, three times, four times to Rawa-Ruska. And then the mayor lost the election and a new mayor was elected, much less Soviet."

In 1978, Father Desbois worked as a math teacher for the French government in Africa. He later worked for Mother Teresa in Calcutta, where he helped set up homes for the dying. After being ordained in 1986 at the age of 31, he became the Superior of the Grand Seminary in Prado, Lyon, in 1992. From 1992-99, he served as Secretary of Jewish Relations for Cardinals Albert Decourtray, Jean Balland and Louis-Marie Billé. After he requested to work with the Jewish community of France, he was appointed secretary to the French conference of Bishops for Relations with the Jewish community from 1999 to 2016. Since 2016 he is a chargé de mission of the Cardinal of Paris. He serves as well as advisor to the Vatican on relations with Judaism.

Desbois attended the Université de Dijon, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1977. He entered the Grand Seminary of Prado in 1981 and was ordained as a priest in 1986. That same year he earned a master's degree in theology from the Catholic University of Lyon.

Patrick Desbois (born 1955, in Chalon-sur-Saône) is a French Roman Catholic priest, former head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops' Conference and consultant to the Vatican. He is the founder of the Yahad-In Unum, an organization dedicated to locating the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazi mobile-killing units in the former Soviet Union. He received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest honor, for his work documenting the Holocaust.