Raphael Lemkin, a long-dead Polish Jew who never set foot in Armenia, is nonetheless regarded there as a champion of justice who exposed the Ottoman-era genocide of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.

In fact, it was Lemkin—a Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his family to the Nazis—who in 1944 coined the word “genocide” to describe what had happened to the Armenians, as well as to the Jews during World War II. Four years later, he succeeded in getting the United Nations to adopt the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Lemkin died penniless in 1959, and while there are no known monuments to Lemkin anywhere in Israel, Armenia has no shortage of them. There’s a bust of Lemkin at Yerevan State University’s “Alley of Gratitude, as well as a street in downtown Yerevan named in his honor.

And last year, on the 125th anniversary of his birth, soil from his grave in Queens, New York, was placed in a wall of remembrance at Yerevan’s Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex.

“Today, we not only honor the legal legacy of Raphael Lemkin, but also his moral conviction,” former museum director Edita Gzoyan said during the June 2025 ceremony at which a commemorative plaque was also unveiled.

“He believed that memory without accountability is empty, and that justice begins by naming the truth,” Gzoyan said. “Lemkin was not Armenian and never visited Armenia. Yet the Armenian genocide left a deep imprint on his soul and became the foundation of his legal thought. He was the one who defined this horrific crime and dedicated his life to ensuring that it would never again go unpunished.”

But in an ironic twist, earlier this summer—just as Israel’s Knesset was debating whether to finally recognize that genocide—Lemkin’s U.S. descendants announced they would take legal action against a Pennsylvania nonprofit that’s been using the family name without authorization.

The Philadelphia-based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, founded in 2021 as a Section 501(c)3 charity, is known for its support of Armenian causes. Among other things, it has condemned Azerbaijan’s 2023 invasion of the ethnic Armenian enclave of Artsakh and criticized President Trump’s 2025 peace accord between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

It has also advocated for ethnic Rohingyas in Bangladesh, persecuted Yazidis in Iraq, Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)