WILLIAM KOREY (1922-2004)

Born in Chicago on June 16, 1922, Bill Korey graduated from the University of Chicago in 1946. He received his Masters degree and doctorate from what is now the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and went on to teach at City College of New York and Columbia. A qualified Soviet expert, he eventually left academia to become a director of the Anti-Defamation League and in 1960 the first director of B’nai B’rith International’s United Nations office. As a lobbyist he helped push the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act which penalized the Soviet Union for restricting Jewish immigration to Israel. In articles and speeches, he defended the 1975 Helsinki Accords between the Community bloc and the West as a channel through which the Kremlin could be influenced.

For decades, William Korey fought for the United States to ratify the convention against genocide, which the United Nations General Assembly had passed unanimously in 1948. Senate ratification came in 1986. Two years later, both houses of Congress passed a bill to make genocide a crime under United States law and President Reagan signed this into law. He went on to write extensively not only in the area of human rights, including studies on Rafael Lemkin – the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word ‘genocide’ in 1943.

Bill Korey was a fierce fighter in the Wallenberg case. He was never afraid to call a Soviet official position a “hoax” or a “lie” or to criticize the U.S. State Department for its failure to act on Raoul’s behalf. He exercised important principles under the UN Declaration of Human Rights to advocate on Wallenberg’s behalf. Long before the Independent Investigation in Russia actually began, Bill’s articles had appeared in publications such as the Congressional Record, Wall Street Journal, Readers Digest, Christian Science Monitor and Los Angeles Times. In a later monograph, published by the American Jewish Committee in 2001, William Korey challenged the claim made by Yakovlev on the eve of the Working Group’s official and independent reports that Wallenberg had been executed in 1947.

In this manner, William Korey worked tirelessly to make sure that the Wallenberg case never fall into what he described as history’s “memory hole. He recognized the urgency of “keeping the gates open” – of continually pressing for archives, stimulating the debate, keeping focus on the goal – and holding officialdom accountable. He did this with courage, strength of intellect, and tirelessly applying the principle of human rights where-ever possible.