Phila. convention to explore Jewish genealogy

For the last six years, the Rev. Patrick Desbois has traveled the back roads of Ukraine, knocking at huts and farmhouses, asking their elderly occupants to speak to him of the unspeakable.

Tonight, before an expected audience of hundreds at the opening of the 29th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, this soft-spoken Frenchman, a Roman Catholic priest, will relay the horrors and shame he found hidden there.

"Most people try to forget the genocide [of the Holocaust] in order to sleep," Desbois said in an interview Friday. "We try to awaken them."

The conference, which continues through Friday at the Sheraton Philadelphia Center City Hotel, will not dwell on the Holocaust. With walking tours and workshops bearing titles such as "Mapping Madness" and "The Role of Philadelphia Jews in the Rise of Basketball," its overall tone is buoyant and industrious.

Yet, program chairman Mark Halpern pointed out, the "imperative" that compels Jewish interest in genealogy is serious.

"Jewish families have been fractured for a long time," said Halpern, an amateur genealogist.

Decades before the Nazi extermination of six million, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Eastern Europe to escape persecution. For many of their children and grandchildren, he said, genealogy is "a way to reclaim the lives and history" of those who fled or were executed.

This is the first time Philadelphia is hosting the convention, which will feature about 125 presenters and is expected to attract nearly 1,000 visitors.

The list of workshops and activities, which runs 12 pages, includes such topics as "Finding Places in the Russian Empire," "Learning the Cyrillic Alphabet," "The Changing Borders of Eastern Europe," "Common Genetic Traits and Diseases" of Jews, and "Finding Your Jewish Ancestors on Ancestry.com."

One of the field trips will visit the South Jersey chicken farms where many Jewish immigrants started their lives in America.

Although most of its events are focused on Eastern European Jewish identity, the convention is open to the public and includes some workshops of general interest to aspiring genealogists, such as "Preserving Documents and Photographs" and "Choosing Genealogy Software."

Unlike the Nazi exterminations in Central Europe, not much was made public about the massacres in Russia during the war - until Desbois recently began to investigate.

His research has revealed that the Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after invading the Soviet Union in 1941.

Grateful for what they supposed was release from communist oppression, or fearful for their own lives, countless Ukrainians pointed out the Jews in their midst – then watched in shock as the Germans herded them into fields or forests, shot them, and buried them in mass graves.

"It was not possible to forget," Desbois said in the interview. "These were not 'one million Jews' but neighbors, schoolmates."

Most of their graves are long grown over. But Desbois, who arrives in Ukrainian villages wearing his clerical collar and asks unaccusing questions, has coaxed his interview subjects into revealing the sites of more then 800 mass graves.

So detailed has his knowledge become, he said, that he can sometimes give an answer when someone asks about an ancestor's burial site.

Lately, he said, he hears of families organizing trips to visit the villages "and pray at the mass grave" of their grandparents or great-grandparents.

In 2004 he created Yahad-in Unum, a Paris organization devoted to Jewish-Christian understanding that is funded by a Holocaust foundation and the Catholic Church. Last year he published Holocaust by Bullets, a book about the Nazi genocide in Ukraine, and said he was at work on a second.

Tonight at 10, the National Geographic Channel will televise Hitler's Hidden Holocaust, about Desbois' work in Ukraine.

Tickets for each day of the conference are $75, although some activities that include travel or meals are extra. Tickets for multiple days are discounted. For more information, visit www.philly2009.org

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