August 19, 2011 – New York – AJC mourns the passing of Jerome J. Shestack, a prominent human rights activist who served for decades as a leader of the agency and chaired AJC’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights from 1989-1992.

“Jerry Shestack was a brilliant, dynamic and effective advocate for human rights and the Jewish commitment to justice for all,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. “Motivated by his deep roots in Jewish tradition, he championed the plight of those abused and excluded worldwide.”

Shestack was one of America’s most distinguished attorneys. He served as National President of the American Bar Association.

He was actively involved with JBI until his death yesterday at age 86. For years, he was a leader in efforts to ensure that international institutions deliver on the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments.

“Human rights is no sport for the short-winded,” Shestack wrote in a JBI publication.

As U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1979-1980, Shestack played a decisive role in helping to create the first “special procedure” of the commission, a working group on forced “disappearances” that investigated and helped resolve cases of Argentinians and others “disappeared” during the military juntas that plagued Latin America at the time. This mechanism became a model for others focused on aiding those silenced, imprisoned, or abused for exercising their human rights.

In addition to his activism on human rights, Shestack worked tirelessly at AJC in support of Israel, civil rights, Holocaust remembrance, and Soviet Jewry. He served as Vice President and Chair of AJC’s Foreign Affairs Commission.

He was a prolific author on human rights themes, including AJC’s “Judaism and Human Rights,” which continues to demonstrate the fundamental linkages of Jewish values and tradition to the struggle for human rights. 

A prominent lawyer with the Philadelphia firm Schnader, Harrison, Segal, and Lewis, he served as chair of the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. For 20 years before that, Shestack was President of the International League for Human Rights, the oldest international non-governmental organization active in defending rights globally, where he led initiatives protesting abuses in the Soviet Union, Latin America, and South Africa.

In 2008, Shestack received the prestigious Gruber Prize for Justice for a lifetime of work to “bring justice to the victims of oppression and discrimination.”

AJC and its Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights extend heartfelt condolences to his wife, Marciarose Shestack, and his entire family. May his memory, as our tradition says, be for a blessing.

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