On December 10, 1948, a French-Sephardic Jew took center stage at the third session of the United Nations General Assembly, held at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France.
Rene Samuel Cassin, a French Sephardic Jew who was a jurist, law professor, judge, and lifelong advocate for global human rights, was the prominent voice that day when the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Rene Cassin proudly stood before the nations of the world and presented the final draft of a groundbreaking and historical document that “affirmed basic rights and fundamental freedoms,” and framed these rights and freedoms in universal terms as “inherent, inalienable and applicable to all human beings.”
What drove Rene Cassin to join the U.N. committee and work meticulously on drafting a presentable final version of the UDHR to the nations of the world?
While Cassin’s advocacy for global human rights predates World War II, it was the Holocaust that turned Cassin’s work and thinking in a new direction. He would state this twenty years later in Stockholm, when he received the world's most prestigious prize.
In 1968, Cassin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his involvement in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In his Nobel address, Cassin stated that "in the wake of World War II, a world which had witnessed the serious, systematic and innumerable violations that could be committed at the orders of a veritable gang, suddenly found itself facing a problem of unsuspected magnitude: to protect the whole of humanity and protect the rights of all human beings.”
For Cassin, who miraculously evaded the concentration camps but lost several family members to the Nazi atrocities, he was profoundly shaken by these losses.
As the world witnesses Russia's blatant violation of human rights in its immoral war of aggression on Ukraine, it behooves us to remember the words and teachings of our "Sephardic Hakham" for this week - Renee Samuel Cassin.
In a 1947 address to the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris (of which he was the president for many years), Cassin famously said: “Jewish rights can be protected only if the cause of universal human rights could be established. The Nazis threatened all of humanity, not just the Jews.”
“Human rights are an integral part of the faith and tradition of Judaism," said Cassin in 1974. "The belief that man was created in the divine image, that the human family is one, and that every person is obliged to deal justly with every other person are basic sources of the Jewish commitment to human rights.”
Thousands of years ago, Moses came down Mount Sinai with the Torah, where thirty-six times it states “You shall not oppress strangers, foreigners, widows or orphans, for you were slaves in Egypt.”
It was with that ancient burden of Jewish memory, along with the knowledge of what happened to his own people and to millions of others just a few years earlier, that Rene Cassin presented the “Torah of Human Rights” to the world on December 10, 1948.
When will the world learn?
Shabbat Shalom