Menachem Rosensaft

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. He was general counsel of the WJC from 2009 to 2023 and the organization’s associate executive vice president from 2019 to 2023. He is also adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School.

He has long been a leader in Holocaust remembrance activities, and was appointed by President Barack Obama to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1994 to 2004 (appointed by President Bill Clinton), and from 2010 to 2020 (appointed by President Barack Obama). In 2009, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the International Conference on Holocaust Era Restitution Issues in Prague. He is the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, chairs the Advisory Council of the Foundation for Memorial Sites in Lower Saxony, Germany, and is a past president of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City.

In 1985, he organized and led a demonstration at the mass graves of the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in protest against visits that day by President Ronald Reagan, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Bergen-Belsen, and the German military cemetery at Bitburg. In 1987, he played a key role in convincing the government of Panama not to give sanctuary to Nazi war criminal Karl Linnas and in ensuring Linnas’ deportation from the U.S. to the Soviet Union. In 1988, Rosensaft was one of five American Jews who met in Stockholm with senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, resulting in the PLO’s first public recognition of Israel.

A prolific writer, he is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, January 2025) and Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (Kelsay Books, 2021), editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes, Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015), and Life Reborn, Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951, published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2001), and co-editor, with Professor Yehuda Bauer, of Antisemitism: Threat to Western Civilization (published by the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1988). He is co-author of “A Measure of Justice: The Early History of German-Jewish Reparations” (with Jodi Rosensaft), Fordham International Law Journal, 2001. He has contributed articles to numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Just Security, The Times of Israel, Haaretz, and Tablet Magazine.

Rosensaft clerked for the Honorable Whitman Knapp, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York.

Rosensaft received his J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1979, a M.A. from the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University and a M.A. in modern European history from Columbia University. In July 2023, he was awarded an honorary PhD by the University of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina in recognition of his "contribution to raising awareness of the genocide against Bosnians in Srebrenica and the Holocaust, through the fight against the denial of crimes and the falsification of historical facts, and for contributing to peace building and the development of a culture of remembrance."