RIFOEL
(RAPHAEL) LEMKIN (June 24, 1900-August 28, 1959)
He was born in Bezwodne (Bezvodnoye),
Lemberg district, Galicia. His father
was engaged in farming. Until age
fourteen he attended religious elementary school, a Polish public school, and
later a high school in Lemberg. He
studied law at the Universities of Lemberg and Heidelberg and received a doctor
of law degree. In 1926 he moved to
Warsaw, supported himself giving lectures to Zionist groups, and later until
the start of WWII he practiced law. For
a time he was the assistant prosecutor for a district court in Warsaw. From 1925 to 1935, he was secretary of the
committee to unify the state legislation in the different regions of Poland. In 1933 he lectured at the League of Nations
in Geneva on a project of a law that would prohibit genocide (in connection
with the murder of Armenians in Turkey, Kurds in Iraq, and others). In 1939, when the Nazis occupied Poland,
Lemkin spent several months hiding in a forest, later living in Vilna for a
time, and from there making his way to Sweden where he gave lectures at
Stockholm University. In 1941 he was
invited to be a lecturer at the University of North Carolina in the United
States. He gathered together materials
on the Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe and published them in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation,
Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York, 1944), 674 pp. +
38 pp. At the Nuremburg Trials against
Nazi war crimes, he was an adviser to the American judges. He was the author of the Genocide Convention
which the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted at its session in
Paris in 1948, and for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950
and 1952. In the 1920s Lemkin was a
contributor to Haynt (Today) in
Warsaw, in which he published articles and had responsibility for a section
entitled “Eytses fun an advokat” (Advice from a lawyer). He also wrote pieces for: Parizer haynt (Paris today); Yoyvl-bukh fun haynt (Jubilee volume for
Haynt) (Warsaw, 1928); Keneder odler (Canadian eagle) in
Montreal; Idisher kuryer (Jewish
courier) in Chicago; and elsewhere. In
book form in Yiddish: Di organizatsye fun
di yidishe kehiles (The organization of Jewish communities), “community
rules, election regulations, election procedures, decrees, commentaries, and
sample documents” (Warsaw, 1928), 80 pp.
Dos industri-gezets
(Industrial law), “the statutes of guilds and journeymen sections; the law on
commercial travelers” (Warsaw, 1929), 193 pp. + 3 pp. (these books were of
considerable help in the Jewish defensive struggle against anti-Jewish laws in
prewar Poland). In his last years, he served
as professor of law at Newark Law School in Rutgers University. He died in New York. He left behind in manuscript in English:
poetry about the Holocaust, portions of a work that dealt with the history of
genocide from the time of Cain and Abel through our own days, and portions of his
autobiography entitled “The Unofficial Man.”[1]
Sources:
Biblyografishe yorbikher fun yivo
(Bibliographic yearbooks from YIVO) (Warsaw, 1928), see index; Dr. R. Feldshuh, Idishe gezelshaftlikher leksikon (Jewish
communal handbook), vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1939), p. 832; L. Leneman, in Morgn-zhurnal (New York) (December 16,
1948); B. Kutsher, Geven amol varshe
(As Warsaw once was) (Paris, 1955), p. 266; Kh. Finkelshteyn, in Fun noentn over (New York) 2 (1956), pp.
206-7; S. Nayten, in Tog (New York)
(September 1, 1959); H. Yustus, in Hadoar
(New York) (Elul [= September-October] 1959); Dr. A. Yafo, in Haarets (Tel Aviv) (June 3, 1960); Dr.
Sh. Margoshes, in Tog (April 25,
1961); obituary notices in the Yiddish and English press in New York, August
30-31, 1959.
Khayim Leyb Fuks
[1] Translator’s
note. Later, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze,
as Totally Unofficial, The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2013). (JAF)
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