This month marks 67 years since my cousin Raphael Lemkin died in New York, nearly penniless, with only a handful of mourners at his funeral. He had spent everything he had, his money, his health, and finally his life, on a single idea: that the deliberate destruction of a people is a crime, and that the crime deserves a name.
He gave it one. He coined the word “genocide” in 1944, after the Nazis murdered 49 members of our family. He then almost single-handedly willed the Genocide Convention into existence at the United Nations in 1948. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize repeatedly. He asked for nothing in return, and he received almost nothing in return. What he left behind was his name and the moral precision of the word attached to it.
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Five years ago this month, a Pennsylvania nonprofit group helped itself to both.
The organization calling itself the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has no connection to Raphael Lemkin. None. No affiliation with our family, no authorization, no relationship of any kind. It simply took the name of a Holocaust survivor and began operating under it, raising money under it, and selling merchandise under it.
What does it do with that name? Increasingly, it aims the word my cousin created at the U.S. government. In its recent publications, the Institute describes immigration enforcement operations as evidence of a “genocidal process underway in the U.S.” It issues monthly briefs cataloging federal agents as though they were the vanguard of an American Rwanda. It has declared that Nazi ideology is being granted political legitimacy in Washington. Days after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, while families were still identifying the bodies of murdered Jews, it declared Israel guilty of genocide.
Readers can hold any view they like about immigration policy or the war in Gaza. That is not my point. My point is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: when everything is genocide, nothing is. Raphael Lemkin built a legal term with edges, a word designed to identify the destruction of peoples, so that the world could never again say it lacked the language to act. An organization that deploys that word as an all-purpose epithet against democratic governments it dislikes is not preserving his legacy. It is liquidating it, and it is doing so while wearing his name.
My family tried to resolve this quietly. In February 2025, our counsel sent a cease-and-desist letter. The institute responded that it was “not closed to a name change.” Then it changed nothing. When we persisted, it did something I still find difficult to write: it publicly branded the family of Raphael Lemkin, a family that lost 49 souls to the Nazis, as “genocide deniers.” And it launched an emergency fundraising appeal on the back of the dispute, asking donors to send money to defend its use of a name it never had the right to use.
So we went to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where the institute is incorporated. Together with the European Jewish Association, and represented by counsel at Sherman Silverstein, I filed a complaint with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D-PA) office and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations. The submission documents the unauthorized use of the name, the solicitation of charitable funds under it, and the conduct that followed our objection. One hundred and twelve Holocaust and genocide scholars, organized by the historian Dr. Rafael Medoff, have signed a letter supporting the family’s position. That matter is now pending, and Pennsylvania has both the authority and the obligation to act.
I want to be clear about what we are asking, because it is modest. The institute is free to hold its views, publish its alerts, and say whatever it wishes about any government on Earth. It is not free to say it in my cousin’s name. Change the name. That is all. It told us in writing that it was open to doing so. Eighteen months later, we are still waiting.
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Raphael Lemkin died believing the word he created would protect the vulnerable, not brand the merchandise of strangers or serve as a partisan cudgel in American politics. Pennsylvania regulators, and every donor who has given to this organization believing it carried the blessing of the Lemkin family, should understand the truth: It never did.
The word “genocide” was born from the murder of my family. Its author’s name is not available for the taking.
Joseph Lemkin is an attorney and the closest living relative of Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor who coined the word “genocide” and fathered the 1948 Genocide Convention.
