Raphael Lemkin served as a columnist for the Zionist World journal. He decried the forsaking of Hebrew as a “sin we have committed against our linguistic patrimony.” And Lemkin declared in 1927 that the “task of the Jewish people is … [to become] a permanent national majority in its own national home.”

And yet despite Lemkin’s Zionist bona fides, 10 days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, on Oct. 17, 2023, the institute named for the Polish-born Jewish lawyer accused the State of Israel of carrying out a “genocide” against Palestinians — the very term that Lemkin coined in 1943 and helped draft into law with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Though it initially said that the Hamas atrocities had “genocidal dimensions,” the organization has since walked back this designation, referring to the massacres as an “unprecedented military operation” and denouncing those who say that Israel’s war against Hamas is a justified response to the Oct. 7 attacks.

Now, members of Lemkin’s family, with assistance from the European Jewish Association, are trying to get the Pennsylvania-based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to stop using his name, calling it deceptive and disparaging.

“The Lemkin Institute, through its very name, as well as its marketing and other materials, represents itself as an embodiment of Mr. Lemkin’s ideology. In reality, the Lemkin Institute’s policies, positions, activities and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin’s belief system,” the EJA legal team wrote in a letter to Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations.

“The Lemkin Institute is not authorized by Raphael Lemkin’s family, his estate, or any custodian of his legacy to rely upon his name for any purpose. The European Jewish Association and Mr. Lemkin’s family are outraged by the Lemkin Institute’s use of Mr. Lemkin’s name, especially in the context of the Lemkin Institute’s anti-Israel agenda,” the attorneys wrote.

James Loeffler, a Johns Hopkins University Jewish history professor and scholar of Lemkin, has even credited Lemkin’s Zionist beliefs with his work on genocide prevention. Though Lemkin distanced himself from the Zionist movement later in life, Loeffler says that this was more of a tactical maneuver as he sought to get nations around the world, including those hostile to Israel, to adopt the genocide convention, not the result of a change of heart on the subject.

Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, founder and executive director of the Lemkin Institute, told eJP that the institute was named after Lemkin to “bring his name back into public discourse.” According to von Joeden-Forgey “there was no clear person to contact” when naming the institute in 2021. 

“We don’t want to cause unhappiness for anybody in the Lemkin family. We did ask to know what legal basis exists for the complaint, and we have not received any response to that specific question,” she told eJP.

According to Alan Milstein, the EJA’s counsel, the statements contradict Lemkin’s life’s work, and his “postmortem right to privacy.” In the letter, the legal team also claims that it falls afoul of the commonwealth’s Solicitation of Funds for Charitable Purposes Act, along with other prohibitions against identity theft, “unauthorized use of name or likeness, and violation of the ‘false endorsement’ and Anti Cyber-Squatting Consumer Protection Act sections of the Lanham Act.”

“It’s important to separate the issue from whether or not Israel is subject to criticism for what’s going on in Gaza,” Milstein told eJP. “That’s not the issue that we are dealing with. Any organization has the right to criticize Israel for whatever it thinks is wrong, but they shouldn’t do it in the name of somebody for whom that would be contrary to his legacy.”

According to Joseph Lemkin, his father — Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin — had close ties to the famed lawyer, supporting Raphael after he immigrated to the United States after the Nazis invaded Poland. “[My dad] was one of the few close people with Raphael in this country when they came over. Raphael was struggling financially because he devoted his life to this cause of genocide. And he was often marginalized because of his focus on genocide. So my father really stood by him and supported him,” Joseph Lemkin said.

Lemkin told eJP that he first learned about the Lemkin Institute from his son, after its statements began circulating widely on social media. While it’s not atypical for the name to be used by a number of initiatives, upon looking into the institute’s public statements, Lemkin said that he felt they contradicted Raphael Lemkin’s values.

“Our family name has been used for quite a number of different scholarships and academic purposes. For the most part, we’re proud, we’re happy,” he told eJP. “But when we see that it’s being used [in a way that’s] contradictory to what we believe Rafael stood for, and, you know, directly opposed to what he stood for, candidly, we feel that… it really disparages the name.”