Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights

The aim of the Institute is to promote high-quality research in the spirit of its namesake, the Jewish jurist of Lithuanian origin Jacob Robinson (1889-1977). His life and work guide the Institute’s academic activities and define its topics:

- Robinson was a member of the Lithuanian parliament and of the European Congress of Nationalities in the 1920s. In both institutions he defended minority rights for Jews and non-Jews. Thus, central topics of the Institute are modern Jewish and non-Jewish minority politics, the idea of national self-determination, and the development of collective human rights and their relationship to individual rights.  

- In 1940, Robinson escaped Europe and moved to New York. There, together with his brother Nehemiah, he developed plans for postwar compensation to Jewish victims of the Nazis. In 1952, Jacob and Nehemiah were involved in the negotiations with Germany over Holocaust reparations. Compensation to Jewish and non-Jewish victims of grave human rights abuses is one of the Institute’s key topics.

- After the war, Robinson advised the American prosecution team in the Nuremberg trials and, decades later, the Israeli prosecution in the Eichmann trial. Thus, major topics of the Institute include international criminal law with respect to the Holocaust and other mass atrocities.

- From the moment of Israel’s founding in 1948, Robinson was a legal adviser of its delegation to the United Nations. Another key topic of the Institute is Israel’s statehood, sovereignty, and relationship with the Jewish and Israeli diaspora.

- Robinson was heavily involved in the drafting of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and took part in the establishment of the UN Human Rights Commission. Other important topics of the Institute involve forced displacement, the history of the human rights regime, humanitarianism, and the interplay between democracy and the rule of law.

The Institute thus covers a wide range of topics integrating several disciplines, especially history, law, and international relations. The topics are reflected in the Institute’s activities:

1. individual research projects conducted by the Institute’s Fellows.
2. academic events organized, co-organized, and supported by the Institute.
3. graduate and undergraduate courses offered by members of the Institute.

The Institute was established in 2020 and belongs to the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
It is supported by the Alfred Landecker Foundation. 
Read more

Jacob Robinson (1889–1977)

Jacob Robinson was a brilliant Jewish jurist and zealous minority rights activist of Lithuanian birth. He served as a member of the Lithuanian parliament from 1923 until its dissolution in 1927, as a delegate to the Congress of European Nationalities from 1925 to 1933, and as a legal advisor to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, representing his country in the intriguing Memel case (1932). After his emigration to New York in 1940, he acted as Founding Director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, which documented the fate of the Jewish minority in Nazi-occupied countries, advocated for human rights as a means for defending the rights of the Jewish people, and promoted the idea of restitution and reparation for Nazi crimes.

Moreover, in 1945-1946, Robinson worked as an advisor to the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and was closely involved in designing the 1946 UN Commission on Human Rights. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he served as legal adviser to its UN mission in New York until 1957 and played a key role in drafting the UN Refugee Convention in 1951. The following year, he co-drafted the Reparations Agreement between West Germany and Israel. Robinson acted as special advisor to Israel’s Attorney General at the Eichmann trial in 1961 and helped establish the research branch of Yad Vashem. Besides his manifold legal and public commitments, he has published widely in the fields of minority rights and Holocaust studies. Robinson died in 1977 at the age of 88 in New York.
Read more (Article by Omry Kaplan-Feuereisen)