Armenia’s Capital Honors Holocaust Survivor Who Coined The Term ‘Genocide’
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) — Armenia’s capital named a street for Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide.
The deputy mayor of Yerevan, Sergey Harutunyan, said during the ceremony earlier this month that Lemkin’s legacy had a “serious impact” on world history, the Armenrpess agency reported from the Dec. 11 ceremony.
Lemkin was born in what is today Belarus to a Polish-Jewish family. He fled the Nazis in 1941 to the United States.
As a jurist, he helped draft the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, for which he had campaigned for years.
The slaughter of thousands of Armenian civilians by Turkish troops during World War I had an early and powerful influence on Lemkin, who was born in 1900. Upon studying it, he wrote, ”my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn’t know all the answers but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.”
Lemkin was fluent in nine languages and was able to read 14. His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Chaim Nachman Bialik novella “Noach and Marynka” from Hebrew into Polish.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
