An international initiative led by the American Jewish Committee has begun to investigate mass grave sites in Ukraine as a first step in a wide-ranging project to protect these Holocaust-era sites.
At a press conference in Berlin marking the first anniversary of the launch of this initiative, the AJC brought together a wide coalition of international groups who will assist in overseeing this project.
Funding for the initiative has been set at around 300,000 euros and is provided by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
This start-up funding will be used to engage teams working for the Paris-based Yahad in Unum organisation under the direction of the French Catholic priest, Father Patrick Desbois, to interview survivors in the towns and villages of Ukraine, Poland and Belarus in order to seek out all the sites of mass killing which began in 1941 with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Presenting the initiative, Rabbi Andrew Baker, the AJC’s Director of International Jewish Affairs, described the project as “a long-term effort that will not be accomplished easily and perhaps never completely, but we shall properly honour the memory of these Holocaust victims.”
On behalf of the Lo Tishkach Foundation, executive director Philip Carmel thanked the German government for their support of this initiative as well as paying particularly tribute to the work of Father Desbois.
“The fact that for the first time we are truly addressing the issue of the mass killings, which pre-date the industrialised murder machine of the death camps, is in no small part thanks to the work of Father Desbois,” Carmel told the press conference. “He has placed this matter on to the international agenda and it is incumbent on all of us to support the vital work he is doing today in investigating the killing fields of Eastern Europe.”
Other organisations involved in this initiative include the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and the German War Graves Commission, the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, the Ukrainian Centre for Holocaust Studies, the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, the Belarus Jewish Community, the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, the International Task Force on the Holocaust, the Conference of European Rabbis and the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe.
