Menachem Z. Rosensaft

He is the editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, and The World Jewish Congress: 1936-2016.

In April 2021, a volume of his poetry, Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen, was published by Kelsay Books.

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.”

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.

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.

He is the editor of Life Reborn, Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2001.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948) is an attorney in New York and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

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".

Menachem Rosensaft is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of Jewish communities around the world based in New York.

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.

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.

Menachem Rosensaft received his B.A. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1971, 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 modern European history from Columbia University in 1975, 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, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, he spent fourteen years as an international and securities litigator at several major New York law firms and at an international bank.

He is multilingual, has broad experience in European, Middle Eastern, and South American legal, commercial, and political issues, and has conducted sensitive negotiations with senior government officials at both national and municipal levels.

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.

Rosensaft was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and reappointed to a second five-year term in 1999, 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.

Rosensaft has been a trustee of the Park Avenue Synagogue since 1994, and he was elected president of the synagogue in 2003.

He is 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), Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, and a member of the editorial advisory board of Moment magazine.

He is a former chairman of the executive committee of the American Section of the World Jewish Congress.

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. 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, and developing innovative educational programs for Russian-Jewish immigrants to Germany.

He was a member of the council's executive committee from 1996 until 2003.

In 1999, he was honored by the mayor of Warsaw for "inspiring work in city planning and preservation of historical monuments".

From September 2000 until December 2003, Rosensaft was a partner in the New York office of a national law firm, representing, among other clients, the audit committee and independent directors of a New York Stock Exchange listed company in connection with an internal investigation of accounting irregularities, a related proceeding brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and class action litigation.

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 January 2004 he joined a financial services firm in New York City as special counsel, becoming its general counsel in May 2005.

He played a key role in guiding the firm through a period of intense regulatory and governmental scrutiny and implementing good governance practices.

He was one of 45 prominent 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.

Since 2008, Menachem Rosensaft has been adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, and was formerly a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law.

In September 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Rosensaft to a third term on the US Holocaust Memorial Council, and reappointed him to a fourth term in January 2017.

In 2011, he was appointed lecturer in law at Columbia University Law School where he teaches a course on the law of genocide.

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.

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.

He has published articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Tablet, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Moment, the New York Law Journal, The National Law Journal, the New York Jewish Week, The Forward, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Just Security and 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.