My family’s name was never meant to become a marketing asset. Yet that is what it has become, and the only people who can stop it are reading this with the power to act and, so far, the patience to wait.
Raphael Lemkin was my cousin. He was a Polish Jewish lawyer who watched the Nazis murder dozens of our relatives and, instead of surrendering to despair, sat down and invented a word for the crime he could not otherwise name. He called it genocide. He spent the rest of his short life, often alone and often broke, persuading the world to turn that word into law.
The 1948 Genocide Convention exists because one man refused to let the slaughter of his people pass without a name. He died in 1959 with almost nothing to his own name except the one he had given to history.
That name now appears on the letterhead of an organization my family never authorized: the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. We did not consent. We were not asked. And for years we have watched it raise money, build a public profile, and borrow the moral authority of a man it never knew, using a name that belongs to his family and to his victims.
I am a lawyer. I do not make accusations lightly, and I am not asking anyone to take my word for what the law requires. I am asking the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to enforce its own.
This week, together with the European Jewish Association, my family sent 100 letters to the officials who can act. We wrote to Governor Josh Shapiro. We wrote to Attorney-General Dave Sunday, whose Charitable Trusts and Organizations Section has plain authority to investigate a charity that solicits donations under a name it has no right to use.
We wrote to the leaders of the General Assembly, to Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, to the Justice Department’s task force on antisemitism, and to the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations. Every letter was verified. Every recipient was named. We did the work so that no one could claim the case was too complicated to understand.
It is not complicated. Pennsylvania law protects donors from charities that mislead them. It protects names from commercial exploitation. A complaint is already pending before the Department of State (Case 26-98-001879). A statement signed by 112 scholars is on file.
The Institute itself has publicly conceded that it may have to change its name. When the accused all but admits the problem, the only thing standing between a wrong and its remedy is the will to act.
And yet the file sits.
Governor, attorney-general, members of the legislature: I write to you as a relative of the man whose name is being used, and as part of a legal community that still believes the law should mean what it says. Please do not let this drift for another year.
Every month of delay is a month in which donors are deceived, and a family is told, in effect, that its grief matters less than someone else’s convenience. That is how wrongs like this win. Not in a single dramatic ruling, but in the quiet accumulation of years in which no one with authority is willing to say “enough.”
I want to be honest about why this cuts so deeply, because it is more than a registration dispute. My cousin defined genocide so the world would defend the persecuted, above all the Jewish people he saw murdered. To watch his name attached to rhetoric that my community experiences as fuel for the oldest hatred is not an irony. It is a wound.
It tells every Jewish family that a name earned in our ashes can be seized and turned against us, and that the institutions meant to protect us will look the other way. I do not believe Pennsylvania wants to send that message. I do not believe its leaders, who have spoken so clearly against antisemitism, would tolerate it if they truly grasped what is being done.
Let me be precise about what we are and are not asking: no one wants the state to police opinions. This is the narrowest of requests. Enforce the laws already on the books about who may raise money under whose name.
Apply to this organization the same standard you would apply to anyone who put a stranger’s name on a charity and started collecting checks. That is all. That is enough.
Raphael Lemkin gave his life to a single conviction: that naming a crime is the first step to stopping it. He would have recognized exactly what is happening here. A wrong is being committed in plain sight; it has a name, and the people with the power to end it are still deciding whether it is worth their time.
It is worth their time. Governor Shapiro, Attorney-General Sunday, and every official who received our hundred letters: you do not need more evidence. You need to act. Open the investigation. Apply the law. Do not allow this to continue for years more while a family pleads and an institution profits.
My family is not asking for vengeance, and we are not asking for a favor. We are asking for our name back and for the simple assurance that in Pennsylvania the law still protects the people it was written to protect.
My cousin built that protection for the whole world out of the worst thing that ever happened to ours. The least his adopted country can do is use it.
The writer is a cousin of Raphael Lemkin and president of the Jewish Bar Association.