Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention

Overview

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is a Philadelphia-based, all-volunteer nonprofit that issues genocide early warnings through a publication series called Red Flag Alerts (Fox News). Its stated origin is unusual for the field: co-founders Elisa von Joeden-Forgey and Irene Victoria Massimino concluded during field visits to northern Iraq in 2016 and 2017 that “very little of the work that goes on at high levels of governments, in international organizations, and among large civil society groups ever reaches people facing genocide and mass atrocity, although they are the people for whom all this work is supposed to be done” — and built the organization to close that gap (Fox News). The group was founded in 2016/2017 as the Iraq Project for Genocide Prevention and Accountability, renamed in 2021 to honor Raphael Lemkin — the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and drove the United Nations 1948 Genocide Convention — registered as a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation on August 19, 2021, and won US federal tax-exempt recognition in September 2023 (Fox News The Algemeiner). The Armenian Weekly dates the rename to 2023 instead; the discrepancy is flagged in the open items below (The Armenian Weekly).

Founding and structure

Von Joeden-Forgey was previously an assistant professor and director of the master’s program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey (The Algemeiner). The two co-founders met religious leaders, government officials, and survivors of ISIS genocide during their 2016 and 2017 northern Iraq trips — Yezidis, Christians, Shabak-Shia, Kakay, and other religious, national, and ethnic minorities (Fox News). The institute has described itself as all-volunteer with no paid staff (The Armenian Weekly); reporting on its 2023 annual report put revenue at $10,300 and described a seven-person leadership team covering outreach, education, research, communications, and operations (The Algemeiner). Co-founder Irene Victoria Massimino left the institute in 2024 (The Algemeiner).

Early-warning work: Red Flag Alerts and country files

The institute’s signature output is the Red Flag Alert series. Its very first Red Flag Alert, in 2021, concerned Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh); the institute kept issuing Artsakh alerts regularly until September 2023, when the region was forcefully depopulated of its Armenian population (Groong). On September 5, 2023, it published a 127-page report assessing the risk of mass atrocities, particularly genocide, against Artsakh Armenians (The Armenian Weekly).

In a separate recognition decision, the institute confirmed to The Daily Star that it recognized the 1971 killings of Bangladeshis by Pakistani occupation forces as genocide. The application had been made in mid-November of the prior year by Tawheed Reza Noor, son of martyred journalist Sirajuddin Hossain, who said it was probably the first official genocide recognition by an international genocide-research institute — a claim reported as his assessment (The Daily Star).

Ukraine: tracking genocide before the invasion and the ICC communications

One of the least-covered threads in the institute’s record is its work on Ukraine. In a December 8, 2023 speech in Kyiv before the International Coalition of Countries for the Return of Ukrainian Children — an event sponsored by the Office of the Ukrainian Ombudsman — von Joeden-Forgey stated that the institute had been tracking the genocidal aspects of Russia’s posture toward Ukraine since before February 24, 2022 (Lemkin Institute). Putin’s denial and criminalization of the Ukrainian identity in pre-invasion speeches put the institute on alert, and it read his accusations that Ukraine was committing genocide against Russians in Donbas as “projection or mirroring” — a common tactic in which perpetrators accuse their soon-to-be victims of the crime they intend to commit (Lemkin Institute). The institute issued a first statement on the invasion on February 26, 2022, followed by a March 20 statement laying out evidence of genocide in the war’s first month — indiscriminate shelling of cities including hospitals and schools, the siege of Mariupol, and kidnapping and forced displacement in occupied regions (Lemkin Institute).

The Kyiv speech also documents a concrete legal output: in April 2022, lawyers from Ukraine’s Regional Center for Human Rights approached the institute about partnering on communications to the International Criminal Court concerning Russia’s transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia — work that produced three ICC communications documenting coordination, planning, and genocidal aims (Lemkin Institute). Von Joeden-Forgey used the speech to lay out the institute’s own analytical contribution: treating the transfer of children as a genocide pattern in its own right — an assault on the family as the organizing principle of group identity — alongside what she termed “life force atrocities” (gang rapes, rapes in front of family members, symbolic mutilations, family separation) (Lemkin Institute).

The institute has also taken positions inside Armenian politics. On May 10, 2024, it condemned Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan’s April 24 genocide-commemoration statement for replacing the term “Armenian Genocide” with “Meds Yeghern,” which it characterized as cryptic engagement with genocide denial. Greg Sarkissian, head of the Zoryan Institute, publicly called for an apology to Pashinyan and the Armenian people, arguing the statement had unfairly omitted Pashinyan’s one use of “Armenian Genocide” — a criticism the Groong interviewers noted he issued in a personal capacity (Groong).

Gaza positions

The institute has “warned of genocide in Gaza since Oct. 13, 2023,” less than a week after the October 7 Hamas attacks (Fox News). On October 18, 2023, it called on the International Criminal Court to indict Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide; the post accumulated 1.3 million views (The Algemeiner). An October 28, 2023 “statement of mourning for the Gazans and the world” said that the United States and Israel were “committing genocide in Gaza only weeks after actively enabling genocide against another besieged people: the Armenians of Artsakh” (Fox News). On May 28, 2024, the institute wrote that “even if there were legitimate doubts about Israel’s genocide, there is no doubt that Israel is committing atrocity crimes of the most barbaric kind. Israel must be stopped,” adding that Western leaders — especially in the US, Germany, and the UK — “should also be put on trial” for material and diplomatic support (Fox News). These positions directly concern the Government of Israel, which strongly denies the genocide allegations (The Media Line).

The naming dispute

Joseph Lemkin, a New Jersey lawyer whose father was Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin, began campaigning against the institute’s use of the name after learning of its Gaza positions (The Algemeiner). He has said the institute “distorts his [Raphael’s] legacy and appropriates his name to advance a definition of genocide which is inconsistent with what we believe was his life’s work,” and in 2025 threatened to sue (The Armenian Weekly). He worked with the European Jewish Association to submit a complaint to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s office and the state’s Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations, including a 32-page legal submission and a 58-page evidentiary appendix in April 2025; he believes an investigation has been opened, while the department says it can neither confirm nor deny complaints or investigations (Fox News). The EJA has also enlisted Israel’s diaspora-affairs minister Amichai Chikli to press the case, and one of Joseph Lemkin’s law firms has accused the institute of defending Hamas and backing Hezbollah — allegations the institute calls false and defamatory (The Armenian Weekly).

The institute’s response has two parts. First, it says permission was never obtainable: Raphael Lemkin died in 1959 without heirs or an estate, so there was no official family representative to contact, and the 2021 rename was made to honor his scholarship and the case studies he completed before his death (Fox News). Second, it says Joseph Lemkin does not speak for the whole extended family: in an October 13, 2025 press release, it named Peter Lemkin — in whose childhood home Raphael Lemkin was a frequent visitor — as particularly supportive, and said family members reached out after October 7, 2023; Peter Lemkin, who lives in the Czech Republic, has joined the institute’s board (The Armenian Weekly). The institute used the October 2025 press release to start a fundraising campaign for legal fees, a full-time administrator, and its survival, framing the challenge as part of “a wider effort to silence opposition to Israel’s genocide in the USA” (Fox News).

Legal analysis in The Armenian Weekly argues the objectors face steep odds: Raphael Lemkin’s relatives have no known inherited rights to his name (he died in abject poverty with no known estate documents), Pennsylvania law limits postmortem name rights to 30 years (expiring in 1989 for a 1959 death), and the statute covers people who died in Pennsylvania while Lemkin died in New York City — analysis attributed to that publication, not an adjudicated ruling (The Armenian Weekly). A University of Pennsylvania law professor told The Algemeiner the liability question turns on whether the name’s use misleads donors and the public or implies endorsement — “they could be” liable (The Algemeiner). The Washington Free Beacon reported that more than 100 Holocaust and genocide scholars signed a letter supporting the family’s objections (The Media Line). The Media Line further notes that any attempt to revoke federal tax-exempt status would face a high legal bar — the IRS controls 501(c)(3) status, Pennsylvania’s charity bureau oversees only state registration and solicitation, and sharply disputed advocacy alone does not usually cost a nonprofit its exemption (The Media Line).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not adjudicate whether the institute’s political or legal positions accurately represent Raphael Lemkin’s views, and it presents the naming-dispute claims as allegations and analysis rather than settled findings. It does not state the outcome of the Pennsylvania charity-bureau complaint, which remains unconfirmed. It does not assert the institute’s current staffing, budget, or operational reach beyond the figures reported in the sources. The rename-year discrepancy between sources is left open rather than resolved. The Daily Star’s “first recognition” characterization of the 1971 Bangladesh decision is reported as the applicant’s assessment.