Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948) is an attorney in New York, a human rights activist, a professor of law and a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of Holocaust survivors.Joseph Berger, "Displaced Persons", in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (2007), Vol. 5, p. 685. He has been described on the front page of The New York Times as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters. He has served as national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people."Eva Fogelman, "Adult Offspring as Moral Voices", in Second Generations Voices, Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, Alan L. Berger & Naomi Berger [edd], Syracuse University Press, 2001, p. 214.
Rosensaft is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of Jewish communities around the world, based in New York.[Menachem Rosensaft, General Counsel Emeritus, World Jewish Congress website https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/bio/menachem-rosensaft] In September 2023, he stepped down as the WJC's general counsel and associate executive vice president after serving in these positions since, respectively, 2009 and 2019."Judy Maltz, "'At Some Point U.S. Jews Are Just Going to Tune Out': Retiring WJC Executive's Warning to Israel," Haaretz, September 21, 2023,
He is visiting professor of the practice at Cornell Law School, where he teaches courses on the law of genocide and on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence. He is also lecturer in law at Columbia University Law School, and taught for several years as a distinguished visiting lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law. In May 2022, he was elected chairman of the advisory board of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation which oversees World War II memorial sites throughout the German state of Lower Saxony, including the site of the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Rosensaft's latest book, Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, was published on January 27, 2025, following an earlier volume of his poetry, Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (Kelsay Books, 2021). He is the editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015), The World Jewish Congress: 1936-2016 and Life Reborn: Jewish Displaced Persons 1946-1951 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, (2001).
Early life The son of two survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Menachem Rosensaft was born on May 1, 1948, in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. From 1945 until 1950, his father, Josef Rosensaft, was chairman of the Jewish Committee of the Bergen-Belsen DP camp and of the Central Jewish Committee in the British Zone of Germany.Menachem Z. Rosensaft, "My Father: A Model for Empowerment", in Life Reborn, Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 2001, pp 77–81; Menachem Z. Rosensaft, "Yizkor For My Father", New York Jewish Week, September 9, 2005. His mother, Dr. Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, was a member of President Jimmy Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, and a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.Hadassah Rosensaft, Yesterday: My Story, Yad Vashem, New York and Jerusalem, 2005; Menachem Rosensaft, "Encounter With My Mother, Eight Years after Her Death", Moment, August 2006, pp 34–36.
Menachem Rosensaft and his parents lived in Montreux, Switzerland, from 1950 until 1958, when they immigrated to the United States where he attended the Ethical Culture-Fieldston schools in New York City. In 1965, while still in high school, he edited the Bergen-Belsen Youth Magazine, a magazine consisting of essays, poems and short stories by children of Holocaust survivors who were born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Academic and professional career Menachem Rosensaft received his B.A. degree in 1971 from Johns Hopkins University, together with an M.A. degree in creative writing from the university's Writing Seminars. From 1972 until 1975, he was an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Jewish Studies at the City University of New York and assisted Professor Elie Wiesel in his courses on Holocaust literature and Hasidism. He received a second M.A. degree in 1975 in modern European history from Columbia University, and in 1979, he received his J.D. degree from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Book Review Editor of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
After clerking for two years for Whitman Knapp, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, he spent 14 years as an international and securities litigator at several major New York law firms and at an international bank.
In 1995, he became senior international counsel for The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, and from 1996 to 2000 was executive vice president of the Jewish Renaissance Foundation, Inc."At a chance meeting between Menachem Rosensaft and Ronald Lauder, Lauder told Rosensaft that if he ever wanted to do something meaningful with his life, he should stop practicing international corporate litigation and come and see him. Shortly thereafter, Rosensaft took a break from practicing law and spent five years directing Lauder's Jewish Renaissance Foundation which seeks to rebuild Jewish life in eastern and central Europe." Eva Fogelman, supra note 3, p. 215. As a foundation executive, he was responsible for the development, coordination and funding of educational and cultural projects in Eastern and Central Europe, including the acquisition and restoration of landmark buildings for use as a Jewish cultural center in Warsaw, Poland.Christopher Bobinski, "A new ghetto rises from the rubble" Financial Times, September 27–September 28, 1997, Weekend, page xxiv; Nora FitzGerald, "In Warsaw, a Jewish Street Reborn" The Washington Post, July 13, 1999, page C1.
From September 2000 until December 2003, Rosensaft was a partner in the New York office of a national law firm, and from 2004 to 2007, he was, at first, special counsel and then general counsel of a financial services firm in New York City.
Rosensaft was appointed in 1994 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Bill Clinton, and reappointed in 1999 to a second five-year term, chairing its Content Committee from 1994 to 2000, its Collections and Acquisitions Committee from 1996 to 2000, and its Committee on Governance from 2000 to 2002. He was a member of the council's executive committee from 1996 until 2003. In September 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Rosensaft to a third term on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council,President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts, September 22, 2010 and reappointed him in January 2017 to a fourth term.Obama Taps 4 To Serve On Holocaust Memorial Board
Rosensaft is a past president of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. He was chairman of the editorial board of the Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs Project, a joint publishing endeavor with Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel),Nadine Epstein, "The Memory Transfer Man," Moment, February 2006, page 28; Menachem Z. Rosensaft, "The Holocaust's Witnesses Must Be Heard," The Washington Post, March 8, 2000, page A31. vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants. He was one of 45 American Jews who discussed the significance of fatherhood within the context of their Jewish identity in the 2004 book, Jewish Fathers: A Legacy of Love.Jewish Fathers: A Legacy of Love, Photographs by Lloyd Wolf, Interviews by Paula Wolfson., Jewish Lights, Woodstock, Vt., 2004, pages 129-31. He received the 2003 Elie Wiesel Holocaust Remembrance Award of Israel Bonds and was awarded the 2006 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Feature Writing of the American Jewish Press Association for his foreword to "Great Love Stories of the Holocaust," published in the June 2005 issue of Moment. In November 2011, he received the Distinguished Humanitarian Award from the Jewish Faculty & Staff Association of New York City College of Technology. In May 2015, he was awarded the Dr. Bernard Heller Prize by the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in recognition of his decades of work on behalf of the Jewish community.Sam Sokol, "Holocaust Survivor Advocate Menachem Rosensaft Honored by Hebrew Union College," Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2015. He has published articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Tablet, Haaretz, The Times of Israel, Just Security, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Law Journal, The National Law Journal, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), The Forward and Moment Magazine, among other publications.
Rosensaft is married to Jean Bloch Rosensaft, also the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who is senior advisor to the president and director of the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is the co-author, with their daughter, Joana D. Rosensaft, of "The Early History of German-Jewish Reparations," published in the Fordham International Law Journal.Fordham International Law Journal, Vol. 25, Symposium, 2001, pages S-1–S45; adapted as "A Measure of Justice: The Early History of German-Jewish Reparations," published as an Occasional Paper by the Leo Baeck Institute, New York & Berlin, 2003.
In September 1981, he was one of the founders of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and was elected the organization's first chairman. Since June 1984, he has had the title of founding chairman. Under his leadership, the International Network organized major conferences of children of survivors in New York in 1984 and Los Angeles in 1987; in 1982, it held the first citywide rally in New York City on behalf of Ethiopian Jewry.Deborah E. Lipstadt/Eva Fogelman, "Children of Holocaust Survivors," in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd Ed. (2007), Vol. 9, page 384. Rosensaft also participated in the planning of and programming for the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in June 1981 in Jerusalem and the mass gatherings of thousands of Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C. (1983), Philadelphia (1985) and New York (1986).
Philosophy of Holocaust Remembrance