This week on Monday Bar-Ilan University awarded an honorary doctorate to Father Patrick Desbois, a French catholic priest who serves as a consultant to the Vatican on Christian-Jewish relations, and who spearheads the search throughout today's Ukraine for the sites of mass shootings of Jews during the Holocaust.
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Father Desbois was honored for his humanitarian work on behalf of the Jewish People, his tenacious efforts to counter Holocaust denial and ensure ongoing remembrance for Shoah victims, and his dedication to religious tolerance and interfaith cooperation.
Through the Yahad–In Unum Association which he heads, Father Desbois collects information about the extermination of the local Jewish population during the Second World War. Through his painstaking efforts he has thus far uncovered more than 800 mass graves of Jews in the Ukraine and Belarus.
He has said that his work is a "social and religious emergency" and it is done in an effort to "combat a wave of Holocaust denial being used to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish people."
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