Yahad – In Unum (“together” in Hebrew and Latin) is a Paris-based organization established in 2004 by Father Patrick Desbois and dedicated to systematically identifying and documenting the sites of Jewish mass executions by Nazi mobile-killing units in Eastern Europe during World War II.

“Holocaust by Bullets” is the model by which mass killings and violence are perpetrated today. Studying the Holocaust in particular will help educate current and future societies on the circumstances and climate which allow for such acts and help us identify warning signals and build our resistance towards future mass killings and violence. Moreover, the Jewish people’s relationship to their own history can teach us how to bring the victims, and not the perpetrators, to the center of commemoration and transmission.
The core programs of Yahad-In Unum:

• Expand the work of identifying additional mass Jewish killing sites, collect forensic evidence of the executions and videotape the witnesses to these killings. Yahad-In Unum’s mission has expanded to seven countries within Eastern Europe. There is great urgency to complete this work in the next three years because the surviving witnesses are now in their late-70’s and early-80’s and the first-person accounts of the history they experienced will soon be silenced.
• Conduct international workshops and graduate-level seminars to add to the scholarship of the Holocaust in particular and genocide in general.  YIU also offers academic programs and collaborates closely with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Promote Holocaust education and information by maintaining a research center and archives in Paris. Thus, YIU’s findings will be available not only to Holocaust museums and centers around the world but to historians, researchers, students and relatives of the victims.

A planning process in early 2012 led to the expansion of field research to Moldova, expansion of work in Poland as well as work in Romania (which is specifically related to the Nazi campaign against the Roma.) A strategic plan now being developed focuses on the final years or field research and the growing educational mission of YIU. A project of investigation in Guatemala to study the cases of killings against civilians between the 1960’s and 1980’s has been started in 2013 and  is now part of Yahad – In Unum’s mission.