For four years, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization called the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention operated with no connection whatsoever to the family of Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer whose name it took. Then the family filed a complaint with Pennsylvania authorities, the press picked it up, and the institute made an announcement. A man named Peter Raphael Lemkin had joined its board.
He lives in the Czech Republic. He had no prior visible involvement with the organization. Joseph Lemkin, whose father was Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin, has never been in contact with him. Neither has his brother Binyamin, an attorney in Israel. The submission filed with Pennsylvania officials by the European Jewish Association puts it plainly: This is not a defense, it is an admission. Consciousness of guilt, manufactured retroactive legitimacy, and bad faith.
That is where this case actually lives. Not in the argument about Gaza, which Americans will keep having, but in the far narrower and far more damning question of what an organization does when it is caught wearing a dead man’s name and is asked to take it off.
MY COUSIN COINED ‘GENOCIDE.’ THEY STOLE HIS NAME — NOW THEY’RE CALLING OUR FAMILY ‘GENOCIDE DENIERS’
Raphael Lemkin lost 49 members of his family to the Nazis. He built the word genocide in 1944 to describe what had been done to the Jews of Europe and to the Armenians a generation earlier, then spent four years pushing the United Nations to adopt the 1948 Convention that made it a crime. He wrote for the Zionist journal Zionist World. He died penniless in 1959 and is buried in Queens. He is honored today with a street and a bust in Yerevan, and soil from that Queens grave now sits in the wall of remembrance at Armenia’s genocide memorial. There is no monument to him in Israel.
In 2021, an existing project renamed itself after him. Nobody asked the family. The institute’s founder, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, later explained that there was no clear person to contact. Joseph Lemkin is a bar-admitted bankruptcy attorney in Princeton, New Jersey. Finding him takes about 30 seconds.
The organization received federal 501(c)(3) status in September 2023. Three weeks later came Oct. 7, 2023.
On Oct. 17, 10 days after Hamas murdered roughly 1,200 people and dragged more than 250 into Gaza, and before Israeli ground forces had entered the strip, the institute accused Israel of genocide. Within days, it was calling for the International Criminal Court to indict Israel’s prime minister. Its initial acknowledgment that the Hamas attack carried genocidal dimensions was later softened into a description of Oct. 7 as an unprecedented military operation. It has since suggested Hamas committed no sexual violence against Israeli civilians. It has framed Hezbollah, an Iranian-funded organization that has murdered Americans, as a form of self-defense that emerged in response to Israel. It has accused the United States of complicity in genocide.
In January, more than one hundred Holocaust and genocide scholars, led by Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute, signed a letter backing the family. Their term for what is being done with Lemkin’s name was Holocaust inversion.
Let me be direct about what this piece is not arguing. Nobody is trying to silence anyone. The institute is entitled to every opinion it holds about Israel, and it can publish them tomorrow under any name it wants to invent. The First Amendment protects speech. It does not confer the right to appropriate a specific dead man’s identity, attach it to positions he spent his life opposing, solicit tax-deductible contributions on the strength of it, and then refuse when his surviving relatives ask for it back. Those are two different questions, and conflating them is the institute’s entire public relations strategy.
The legal questions now sitting in Harrisburg are ordinary ones. Pennsylvania’s Solicitation of Funds for Charitable Purposes Act governs how charities represent themselves to donors. The family’s lawyers have also invoked the postmortem right of publicity, false endorsement under the Lanham Act, and the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. A complaint is pending before the Pennsylvania Department of State. In June, 100 individually verified letters went to Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), state Attorney General Dave Sunday, the Justice Department, the IRS, the Treasury Department, state legislative leaders, and Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation. Israel’s diaspora affairs minister wrote to Shapiro directly.
The reporting indicates Pennsylvania has opened an inquiry, and pointedly, one that concerns the use of the name and compliance with nonprofit organization fundraising law rather than the institute’s opinions. That is exactly the right scope. It is also a test of whether a state regulator will apply routine charity law to a politically fashionable organization the way it would to any other registrant.
There is a final irony that ought to trouble people who have never given Israel a moment’s thought. The institute has done real advocacy for Armenians, Yazidis, Rohingya, and Uyghurs. Its Armenian work is why Yerevan reveres the man whose name is on its door. And the more promiscuously the word genocide is applied to any war a nonprofit group finds objectionable, the less it is worth to the people who genuinely need it. Armenia has spent a century fighting for one word. Debasing the currency does not help them. It helps the deniers.
A JEW WHO FLED NAZIS COINED ‘GENOCIDE’ — NOW ANTI-ZIONISTS ARE HIJACKING HIS NAME
Lemkin gave the English language its only word for the deliberate destruction of a people. His family is asking a state government to enforce the unremarkable principle that you cannot take a man’s name without permission and monetize it against everything he stood for.
Pennsylvania should answer them. And when an organization responds to that request by producing a board member from the Czech Republic, the regulators should understand precisely what they are looking at.
Warren H. Cohn is founder and CEO of RocketshipPR. He has advised the European Jewish Association in connection with this matter.