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Home > About Us > Biographies > Menachem Z. Rosensaft About the World Jewish CongressMenachem Z. Rosensaft
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New York lawyer and Jewish community activist Menachem Z. Rosensaft was appointed General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress in March 2009. Rosensaft, who drafted the organization’s new constitution which was adopted in January 2009 at the WJC’s 13th Plenary Assembly, will serve as an officer of the WJC and a member of its Executive.
Menachem Rosensaft received his J.D. degree from the Columbia University School of Law in 1979, after receiving an M.A. degree from the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University and a second M.A. in modern European history from Columbia. He is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School where he teaches a course on World War II war crimes trials. After clerking for the Hon. Whitman Knapp, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, he was a securities and international litigator at several national law firms and an international bank, headed a foundation engaged in cultural activities in Central and Eastern Europe, and was general counsel of a major New York Stock Exchange financial services firm. In the latter capacity, he was instrumental in guiding the firm through a period of intense regulatory and governmental scrutiny, and implementing good governance practices.
The son of two survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Rosensaft has long been a leader in Holocaust remembrance activities. He is the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs Project, a joint publishing endeavor with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. In 1994, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, chaired its Content Committee, Collections and Acquisitions Committee, and Committee on Governance, and served on the Council’s Executive Committee from 1996 until 2003. He is also a former National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance and Honorary President of the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan. His wife, Jean Bloch Rosensaft, is Senior National Director for Public Affairs and Institutional Planning at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and director of its New York museum.
A prolific writer, Rosensaft is the editor of Life Reborn, Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and co-author, with his daughter, Jodi Rosensaft, of A Measure of Justice: The Early History of German-Jewish Reparations, published as an Occasional Paper by the Leo Baeck Institute. His poems “Father” and “Poland” are featured, respectively, in the Reform Movement’s Mishkan T’filah, A Reform Siddur, and the Conservative Movement’s Siddur Tishah B’Av. He received the 2003 Elie Wiesel Holocaust Remembrance Award of Israel Bonds and was awarded the American Jewish Press Association’s 2006 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Feature Writing.
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