Exposed: Anti-Israel group under fire for using name of Raphael Lemkin, Zionist who coined the term genocide

The institute’s vocal anti-Israel advocacy has continued unabated for the past year. 

By Ira Stoll, The Algemeiner

Members of the family of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and pushed for the passage of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, say they are outraged that a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization is using the Lemkin name to pursue an agenda of extreme anti-Israel activism.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention was initially registered as a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation on Aug. 19, 2021, and won US federal tax-exempt recognition in September 2023.

In recent months, it has veered into strident anti-Israel political advocacy, supporting anti-Israel campus protests and reaching millions of viewers with social media posts that falsely accuse Israel of genocide.

Less than one week after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, the institute released a “genocide alert” calling the onslaught an “unprecedented military operation against Israel” while decrying the Jewish state’s actions against Hamas as “genocide.”

The Oct. 13 message came before Israeli launched its ground offensive in Gaza.

Then on Oct. 18, 2023, the Lemkin Institute called on the International Criminal Court “to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the crime of #genocide in light of the siege and bombardment of #Gaza and the many expressions of genocidal intent.”

The social media post accumulated 1.3 million views, according to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The institute’s vocal anti-Israel advocacy has continued unabated for the past year. In September, for example, it described Israel’s war against Lebanese Hezbollah as “terrorism” and “the slaughter of Arab peoples” leading to “the wanton slaughter of all mankind.”

The post did not mention that Hezbollah is an internationally designated terrorist organization that began firing rockets at Israel the day after the Oct. 7 attacks.

To mark the US presidential election last Tuesday, the institute issued a “statement on genocide and the [election],” declaring, “To the next president, we emphasize that it is in the interests of the US polity to cease its military support for Israel.”

‘Totally Outraged’: Lemkin Family Disavows Institute

Joseph Lemkin, a New Jersey lawyer who is related to Raphael Lemkin, said he was unfamiliar with the institute until being informed of it by The Algemeiner.

Lemkin, who represented the family at a UN event marking the 65th anniversary of the genocide convention, described himself as “totally outraged” to see his late relative’s name used to push an anti-Israel agenda. His father was Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin.

“Members of our family were killed in the Holocaust, and Rafael Lemkin would be outraged by the use of his name and the abuse of the word genocide,” Joseph Lemkin said in a statement to The Algemeiner that was copied to eight of his family members.

“Our family fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself and are fully in favor of US policies to support Israel. Indeed, we have many family members in Israel; family members who have served in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and others that have been impacted by the terror of Hamas.”

The family is discussing possible steps ranging from a joint public statement to a cease-and-desist letter aimed at getting the Philadelphia organization to drop the name.

The co-founder and executive director of the institute, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, was previously an assistant professor and director of the masters program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.

Joeden-Forgey did not respond to two emails and two cellphone voicemail messages from The Algemeiner left both last and this week seeking comment.

Her co-founder, Irene Victoria Massimino, told The Algemeiner that she is no longer with the Lemkin Institute and “cannot speak on its behalf.”

A Pathbreaking International Lawyer Dedicated to Zionism

Lemkin was born in Poland in 1900 and eventually escaped the Nazis to America, where he joined the War Department, documenting Nazi atrocities and preparing for the prosecution of Nazi crimes at the Nuremberg trials.

He dedicated much of his life to making the world recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and designating mass murder as a crime which could be prosecuted through international law.

Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, were killed in the Holocaust. He died in 1959 in relative obscurity.

A 2017 article by James Loeffler, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, described what he called “the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin.”

Loeffler noted that while “dead international lawyers rarely become celebrities,” Lemkin “has emerged as a potent symbol for activists and politicians across the world.”

Scholarly and popular attention to Lemkin has blossomed in recent years, with his story featured everywhere from the alumni magazine at Duke University, where he taught, to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

A search of one database of academic articles, JSTOR, turned up 1,515 references to Lemkin, of which 1,133 were from 2005 or later.

Samantha Power, a Harvard professor who served as UN ambassador during the Obama administration and administrator of the US Agency for International Development during the Biden administration, highlighted Lemkin’s story in a 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book; she is said to have kept a framed portrait of Lemkin on her office wall while serving as a White House staffer.

Loeffler traced Lemkin’s work as an editor and columnist of a Jewish publication, Zionist World.

“The task of the Jewish people is … [to become] a permanent national majority in its own national home,” Lemkin wrote in one such column.

“It is not enough to know Zionism,” Lemkin wrote in another column quoted by Loeffler. “One must imbibe its spirit, one must make Zionism a part of one’s very own ‘self,’ and be prepared to make sacrifices on its behalf.”

‘A Genocidal State That Is Completely Out of Control’: The Institute’s Relentless Critique of Israel

The Lemkin Institute’s social media account has been persistent in defending anti-Israel activists that the US government defines as antisemitic.

For example, the American ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, posted on Oct. 29, “As UN Special Rapporteur Albanese visits New York, I want to reiterate the US belief she is unfit for her role. The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.”

The Algemeiner has reported extensively on how Francesca Albanese has used her position as the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’s attacks on the Jewish state.

Nonetheless, the Lemkin Institute’s account jumped into the replies of Thomas-Greenfield’s post with a defense of Albanese and an attack on the American diplomat.

“Your attack on UN special Rapporteur Albanese is so clearly intended to hide your criminal complicity in an ongoing genocide that you truly should be embarrassed,” the institute wrote in a post which, according to X, garnered 294,000 impressions.

“Is there any trick from the genocidaire’s playbook that you will refuse to carry out?”

The post continued, “Francesca Albanese is an upstander. She will be remembered as a hero. You will be remembered as a perpetrator and an apologist. As experts on the crime of genocide, we can say this with certainty.”

The institute’s 2023 annual report listed only $10,300 in revenue. Yet in addition to the outsized social media footprint, the institute has also generated press mentions, with coverage and placements in media outlets including Newsweek and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Its website lists a seven-person leadership team that includes personnel devoted to outreach, education, research, communications, and operations.

A Facebook post from September by the Lemkin Institute accused Israel of “sexualized violence,” asserting, “This sexualization alone is indicative of genocidal violence, as it indicates a desire to destroy Palestinians as such by desecrating symbols of generation and undermining the ability of Palestinians to reproduce biologically and culturally.”

An August post from the organization criticized the elimination of Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh.

“The Lemkin Institute strongly condemns this attack … We condemn Israel’s decision to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh, which sends a clear message that Israel is not interested in any peace, much less the ongoing peace process,” the institute said.

In April, the group issued a statement expressing solidarity with anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University and criticizing the Columbia administration for calling in police to clear a pro-Hamas “encampment.”

“Expressions of opposition to the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s apartheid policies are not the same as expressions of antisemitism or hatred of Jews and the Jewish faith,” the statement said.

“What is being labeled as ‘antisemitism’ is, in large measure, the visceral outrage that many young people feel toward the State of Israel and its military for the deadly occupation of Palestinian land and the mass-murder genocide they see every day in the news.”

When Israel in September targeted Hezbollah terrorists by exploding their pagers and other communications devices, the Lemkin Institute issued a post with more than 700,000 views condemning what it called “Israel’s terrorist attacks against Lebanese people.”

“Hezbollah, the ostensible ‘target’’of the attacks, is not a simple ‘terrorist organization’ engaged in criminal activity. It is also a political party and a service provider for southern Lebanon, so it includes civilian doctors, nurses, teachers, and so forth. Are they terrorists?” the post asked.

“What we see is a genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a Western world that is, in large measure, too racist and Islamophobic to care.”

“Shame on you for appropriating the Lemkin name to spread propaganda,” replied the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, Robert Silverman.

Silverman’s reply, seen by only a few hundred users, raised a cutting-edge legal question: Who has the right to use the Lemkin name?

“In the USA, in most states, people have rights of privacy and/or publicity based on common law or statute to the use of their own name or likeness or identity,” said Anita Allen, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on postmortem privacy rights.

“In some instances such rights descend to heirs or assignees after death. The details of a particular case would determine whether the organization in question is subject to civil liability,” she said. “They could be.”

A Burgeoning Field of Anti-Israel Critique

The Lemkin Institute’s use of the Holocaust as a weapon with which to critique Israel is not an outlier.

Rather, it reflects how the rapidly expanding genocide and Holocaust studies fields, much of it funded by gifts and endowments from well-intentioned Jewish donors, have veered away from the facts and the law and toward, instead, anti-Israel activism.

In one case from earlier this year, a doctoral student at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies reportedly confronted a visiting Israeli reservist and publicly accused Israel of genocide.

Months later, in August, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University wrote in an article for The Guardian that it was “no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions.”

That same professor, Omer Bartov, joined other Holocaust and genocide studies scholars in declaring in the New York Review of Books that “Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians.”

anti-IsraelRaphael LemkinThe Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention