January 22, 2011 – Berlin – AJC has formed an international coalition to protect and memorialize the mass graves of Holocaust victims in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The German government is providing funds in support of this project.

“This is a long-term effort that will not be accomplished easily and perhaps never completely, but we shall properly honor the memory of these Holocaust victims,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, AJC Director of International Jewish Affairs, at a news conference held Friday at AJC’s Berlin Office.

The announcement comes a year after AJC called for “a concerted and comprehensive effort to identify, protect and memorialize the mass graves of Holocaust victims throughout Eastern Europe,” and just days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.

“It is important to remember that the Holocaust did not begin in Auschwitz,” said Rabbi Baker. “It began 70 years ago with the mass killings of Jews who lived in the towns and villages that came under German occupation as Nazi troops marched eastward. Before the death camps and crematoria were planned and built, more than one and a half million Jews were shot and buried in shallow unmarked graves.”

The AJC coalition will draw on the research and expertise of key individuals and organizations, including Jewish community leaders in Belarus, Poland and Ukraine, to identify and protect the mass graves.

Crucial to this endeavor has been the data assembled by Father Patrick Desbois and his Paris-based organization, Yahad in Unum, indicating the sites of hundreds of mass graves. This data will be provided to AJC.

AJC honored Father Desbois with its Jan Karski Award in 2007. "I do this work to combat a wave of Holocaust denial being used to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish people," Desbois said at AJC’s Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. "When the last of the Holocaust survivors passes away, Holocaust denial will become worse."

Last month, members of the AJC coalition visited five pilot memorial sites in Western Ukraine, north of Lviv. “These and other sites that have been preserved since the fall of the Soviet Union have largely been the result of private initiatives without the benefit of professional research,” said Deidre Berger, Director of AJC’s Berlin Office/Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations. “In 2011, the coalition hopes to begin protecting these pilot sites, as well as sites in Poland and Belarus, with concurrent efforts to initiate educational research and projects.”

AJC, a global advocacy organization, is a leading international partner in promoting issues of Holocaust remembrance. Members of the AJC coalition to protect and memorialize the mass graves include the Conference of European Rabbis, the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and the German War Graves Commission. 

Other organizations involved in the coalition include the Ukrainian Jewish Community, the Ukrainian Holocaust Center, the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, the Brussels-based Lo Tishkach, the Belarus Jewish Community and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.