Raphael Lemkin being interviewed on Feb. 13, 1949. Photo: Screenshot

The head of a stridently anti-Israel group has attacked dozens of prominent Holocaust scholars who called out the US-based nonprofit for “exploiting” the name of Raphael Lemkin — the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who survived the Holocaust and subsequently coined the term “genocide” — to “falsely accuse” Israel of genocide.

Following the attack, multiple members of the Lemkin family expressed to The Algemeiner their firm opposition to the organization’s using their relative’s name to pursue a campaign of anti-Israel activism.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, co-founder and executive director of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, denounced more than 100 distinguished scholars, including two former leaders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for supporting Joseph Lemkin. Lemkin — a relative of Raphael Lemkin, who helped draft the Genocide Convention after World War II and after whom the institute is named — is fighting to disassociate his cousin from the anti-Israel institution.

The Pennsylvania-based nonprofit, established in 2021, began accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, where Palestinian terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages in the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

The institute accused the Jewish state of genocide even before the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched its ground offensive in Gaza weeks later. It further promoted the position that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court for war crimes. In September 2024, the group expressed skepticism about whether Hamas terrorists raped Israeli victims, despite widely available evidence showing rampant sexual violence, and it has since continued criticizing Israel.

“In recent months,” the institute “has veered into strident anti-Israel political advocacy, supporting anti-Israel campus protests and reaching millions of viewers with social media posts that falsely accuse Israel of genocide,” The Algemeiner reported on Nov. 13, 2024, first exposing the group’s activity and the Lemkin family’s opposition to it doing so under their name.

“Joseph Lemkin, a New Jersey lawyer who is related to Raphael Lemkin, said he was unfamiliar with the institute until being informed of it by The Algemeiner,” the report said.

That was when Joseph Lemkin became determined to remove his family name from the institute.

Most recently, more than 100 distinguished scholars, led by Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, based in Washington, DC, penned a letter to Lemkin, expressing support for his effort.

“As scholars who have written about the Holocaust or other genocides, we share your family’s concern about extremists exploiting Raphael Lemkin’s name to attack Israel,” said the letter, which was dated Jan. 25 but not publicized until Jan. 30. “We support your efforts to reclaim the legacy of Raphael Lemkin from those who are besmirching his ideals and goals.”

Days later, in response, von Joeden-Forgey discussed the “ridiculous letter” in a LinkedIn post. “It is always a pity to realize how much ugliness they [the letters’ cosigners] hid behind their ‘Holocaust & Genocide Studies’ façade,” she wrote on Feb. 2, adding that she was “disgusted” by them.

Raising six points, von Joeden-Forgey claimed:

1) The idea that Raphael Lemkin would support Israel’s actions is ridiculous and itself constitutes a disparagement of his work and memory.

2) There are family members who support our work, so Joseph Lemkin — the only family member we have heard of who does not — does not represent “the family” or “the name.”

3) There has never been a good faith effort on Joseph Lemkin’s part to reach out to us to discuss his concerns. This has been a political hit job from the beginning. We have offered to discuss the issue twice. He instead decided to pursue a possible legal action and, when he realized he had no legal standing, he resorted to defaming us to US elected officials, government agencies, and the right-wing press.

4) I would like to ask these “scholars” to let us all know what they have been doing to reduce Palestinian deaths from Israel’s “war” and, more broadly, to prevent genocide in our world, since they find our work so egregious.

5) These “scholars” should be truly ashamed for calling our institute “extremist” in a political environment where they well know the impact that word can and probably will have on the freedoms of the US-based members of this institute. I consider these “scholars” to be supporting the US government’s assault on constitutional rights, particularly the First Amendment. They are, in other words, part of the genocide problem not the solution. But, of course, they must know that, considering that they should have read all about how these things work.

6) Blind support for Israel’s actions is genocide denial.

 ‘A Complete Lie’

Joseph Lemkin told The Algemeiner that the family is supportive of his stand — “except for one lone wolf. He used to live in the United States, and now he criticizes the US and criticizes Israel and has sent me some nasty emails, but he has never come out in public on the issue as far as I know.”

“To the contrary,” he continued. “My brother, Benjamin, has spoken out publicly; my sister, Rachel Memeles, and all of our children as well as my mother, who was married to my father, Daniel Lemkin — Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin. They were born in the same town.”

“My father was a Holocaust survivor. His parents and three brothers were all killed in the Holocaust. Raphael had no descendants; he didn’t have children of his own.”

Raphael Lemkin’s grave, Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York. Photo: Oberezny, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Joseph also adamantly rejected the claim that he never reached out to the institute to discuss his concerns.

“Beyond being a complete lie, we have reached out through our counsel,” he said. “In actuality, they had suggested, through their attorney, that they would consider changing the name from the Lemkin Institute.”

According to the attorneys’ letter, sent on behalf of Joseph Lemkin and the European Jewish Association and obtained by The Algemeiner, the institute may face legal action if it does not accept a name change voluntarily.

“We are prepared to move forward to compel the Lemkin Institute to cease using Raphael Lemkin’s name and likeness,” it said. “We have recently read in one of your press releases, however, that you would consider dropping the Lemkin and simply call yourself The Institute for Genocide Prevention, Inc. If that is indeed the case, our issue with you is resolved. We certainly prefer to amicably resolve this matter. Please advise.”

“So, our attorneys reached out to them, but we never heard back,” Joseph Lemkin told The Algemeiner.

“The one thing that stands out,” he continued, “is that if you go on their website, you’ll see they sell Palestinian flags and mugs. This is an activist organization — not a principled organization looking to identify genocide. They have an agenda, and they’re trying to push it. That’s my concern. It doesn’t seem that they’re starting on a balanced playing field.”

“We reached out directly, through our counsel, at least twice — most recently in October and got no response,” he added.

‘A Terrible Thing They’ve Done to the Lemkin Name’

Joseph’s brother, Benjamin Lemkin, similarly told The Algemeiner that he opposes the institute’s use of his family name.

“It’s completely obvious that Raphael Lemkin would not have been accusing Israel of genocide in any fashion,” he said. “By all objective standards, Israel has done more to protect civilians than any other country fighting wars — even when those countries are not fighting wars of an existential nature. In this case, however, Israel is fighting a war of an existential nature. If anything, perhaps Raphael Lemkin, who was a Zionist and a strong advocate of Jewish survival, would have felt that Israel possibly is not doing enough to defend itself.”

He continued, “Given the fact that Raphael Lemkin was motivated in part by the scourge of antisemitism, he would have immediately identified all of these malicious genocide accusations as constituting an antisemitic blood libel.”

“I am very proud to be part of this effort against the Lemkin Institute, and I have never heard of any family member supporting the institute,” he said, noting that he was quoted in November 2025 by The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, expressing his agreement with his brother’s initiative.

“If Raphael, who died in 1959, were alive today, he definitely would have been outraged,” he told the Post. “It is an abuse of his work … This is a terrible thing they’ve done to the Lemkin name.”

Medoff, the Holocaust scholar who spearheaded the letter in support of Joseph Lemkin, lamented how the institute attacked his colleagues.

“It’s sad that the Lemkin Institute’s president would stoop to questioning the scholarly credentials of some of the most prominent academics in the world of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, including authors of major texts in the field, chairs of university departments and Holocaust centers, and editors of leading publications,” Medoff told The Algemeiner, noting that in her LinkedIn post, von Joeden-Forgey put the word “scholars” in quotes. “She seems to be saying that you don’t even qualify as a scholar unless you agree with her anti-Israel views. What a remarkable position to take.”

The Algemeiner reached out to von Joeden-Forgey for comment but did not receive a response.

Atara Nurenberger Beck made aliyah in 2011 from Toronto, where she had many years of journalistic experience. She is currently a freelance writer and editor.

Bats get bad press. Short-sighted and cave-dwelling, they generally make the news only when carrying disease, transfiguring into vampires, or else lending their name to paranoiac military commanders (e.g. Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano, in Dr. Strangelove). 

All of which is grossly unfair — at least according to Yossi Yovel, a professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, and author of The Genius Bat, recently named a ‘Book of the Year’ by the science journal Nature. 

“Usually, bats are very nice,” said Yovel.

Indeed, the flying mammals have been remarkably tolerant towards Yovel and his small team of researchers, who’ve studied bat echolocation for the better part of a decade, and have proved that bats are smarter creatures than previously thought. And only rarely, Yovel said, has he gotten bitten. “But you can’t blame them,” he added. “Because you’re holding them in your hand, and you’re a big creature.”

Yovel first encountered the study of bats, or chiropterology, as an undergraduate at Tel Aviv University, where he took a course on bat echolocation, the first ever held in Israel. He was immediately hooked. “Suddenly, I discovered this new world! Of using sound for vision, basically,” he said.

Sensory zoology, as the broader research field is known, meant Yovel could combine two of his abiding interests: animals and physics. The ways in which animals used sound to get around provoked mathematical questions, not just biological ones.

When Yovel started his research in the late 2000s, he was the first Israeli zoologist to focus explicitly on bats’ sensory behavior. Previously, researchers had only explored bat physiology: how they maintained heat, how they hibernated, what they ate, and so forth. Yovel, by contrast, was “all about sound.”

His most important contribution to the field to date, one described in detail in The Genius Bat, is using GPS devices to track bats and show that they are, in fact, thinking, feeling creatures.

To create the gadgets, Yovel approached an Israeli startup that specialized in manufacturing minuscule GPS instruments — the company had initially designed them in the early aughts, intending to put them inside cameras — with an unusual request: Could they make one that Yovel could stick, using biological glue, to bats?

“So they developed it for me,” Yovel said. “And though the main thing is the GPS, there’s also a microphone in there. And that combination is what’s so unique, because we wanted to record sound echolocation as the bats are flying.”

The research can be hands-on (Yovel attaches the trackers himself) and not without its challenges — chief among them retrieving the devices, which by design fall off the bats within a few days.

Yovel and his team wear antennae, which pick up signals from a “small pinger” attached to the GPS, but still can spend hours searching.

“It’s a huge bottleneck that people are not aware of,” he said. “It’s like a treasure hunt, and often we climb mountains or have to go through thick vegetation.”

To tackle this problem, Yovel and his team constructed a lab — “our own bat colony,” he calls it — at Tel Aviv University, where dozens of bats roost. But the bats are allowed to roam free, so they “go out and come back,” Yovel said.

Thanks to the facility, Yovel can track bats for months, even years, though they haven’t exactly gone undetected. “Sometimes, people complain to me about bats pooping on their cars and on their houses,” he said. “I say to them, ‘tell me where you live, and I can check if our bat visited your backyard or not!”

By studying the bats’ sonar activity, Yovel and his team have shown that bats possess what he describes as a “cognitive map in their brain.” They’ve demonstrated, for instance, that bats can map time, avoiding objects — a tree, say — that they’ve previously visited. “They know that a long time has passed,” said Yovel, “and so they will not return to this tree, because they assume that there’s no more fruit on it.”

Bats even respond to illness in a fairly recognizable manner, often deciding simply to stay at home. “Sick bats will usually avoid any contact, and will not fly out, just like we prefer to be in bed when we’re sick,” Yovel said.

Whether this rises to the level of full-on consciousness is a matter of some debate, though Yovel believes that bats — indeed, most animals — have at least some degree of consciousness. The challenge, then, is finding “sophisticated ways to probe these degrees.” After all, how do you measure such a thing without language as a guide?

He reaches for an unusual comparison to emphasize the dilemma: toddlers. “Pre-lingual toddlers are obviously conscious, right? But we need to find ways to examine this using behavioral experiments, because we can’t ask them,” he said. Artificial Intelligence will certainly play an important role. “That’s the future,” Yovel said. “Using AI models to simulate bat behavior.”

So Yovel will continue to use bats to explore what he calls the “consciousness-gap” between humans and animals. “Or,” he added, grinning a little, “the lack of a gap.”

The post For Israel’s foremost chiropterologist, every bat is a mitzvah appeared first on The Forward.

A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Over the last few weeks, something truly historic happened in Israel, and many may have missed it.

It had nothing to do with Iran or coalition politics. Instead, it touched the heart of the most sacred contract the Jewish state makes with its citizens: how it treats the families of those who gave their lives for its existence.

The Knesset has passed a series of long overdue legislative amendments that together mark the most significant expansion of support for bereaved IDF families in decades.

One of these reforms ends a painful injustice toward IDF widows and widowers. Survivor pensions will no longer be revoked upon remarriage or reduced through arbitrary caps and exclusions that punished bereaved spouses for trying to rebuild their lives.

The financial impact will be significant, and for many families, life changing. But the moral statement is even greater. Israel has affirmed that love, partnership, and hope should never come at the cost of security for those left behind.

To grasp the weight of this moment, we must look back more than fifty years, to the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Thousands of young widows navigated loss in a traumatized nation.

The widow of a fallen soldier was treated with reverence. The actual widow was not.

Many were discouraged, implicitly and explicitly, from remarrying or moving forward. Too often, widows were forced to choose between emotional healing and economic survival.

That injustice helped give rise to the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization, created to ensure that bereaved families would not be forgotten once war faded from public view.

Today, Israel faces such a moment again. Since October 7, more than 900 service members have been killed, leaving over 350 new widows and nearly 900 children, 250 of them under the age of five.

This new legislative package represents a break from the past. It signals that Israel will not ask this generation to carry grief quietly, or to sacrifice a second time in order to survive.

As if this were not historic enough, a second legislative reform passed alongside it is even more financially significant than the remarriage provision alone. This legislation expands not only moral recognition, but the actual material support that bereaved families will receive for decades. Adult orphans are formally recognized for the first time well into adulthood, unlocking monthly payments across age brackets that were previously invisible in law. Widows receive compensation reflecting real loss of earning capacity rather than symbolic recognition. Housing grants are expanded and decoupled from outdated marital conditions. Education, rehabilitation, fertility treatment, childcare, and emotional support are addressed as integrated needs rather than fragmented entitlements.

This is not incremental policy tinkering. It is a billion-shekel commitment that will translate into far more direct aid, far more stability, and far more dignity for thousands of families whose lives were irreversibly altered in service of the country. It corrects injustices that accumulated quietly over generations, often borne by adult orphans who were expected to stand on their own simply because time had passed.

And yet, even as we recognize the significance of this moment, we must acknowledge what remains unfinished. Significant groups, including adult orphans from earlier wars, still stand outside formal frameworks of support. Their loss did not change. Only the calendar did.

History is not only made on battlefields or in war rooms. Sometimes it is made quietly, in committee hearings and plenary votes, when a nation decides what it owes to those who paid the highest price.

Last week, Israel made history, not only by passing laws, but by reaffirming its covenant with the families of the fallen. Now it must complete that covenant, until no widow, no widower, and no orphan is ever left behind.

The author is the Executive Director of IDF Widows and Orphans USA.