Felice Gaer, Jewish organization official who championed human rights for all, dies at 78

For over 30 years, Felice Gaer Baran directed the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, assuring Jews a seat at the table in global debates around torture, political repression, LGBT rights and antisemitism.

After the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa devolved into what she called “a cacophony of Israel baiting and outright anti-Semitism,” she worked with U.S. and European officials to demand change at a U.N.-sponsored body that defamed Israel and the Jews, and to restore the body’s focus on the scourge of racism in all its forms, including antisemitism.

“Lo and behold, the United Nations has produced a new draft seeming to meet those conditions,” Gaer wrote in a JTA oped in 2009. “In actuality, however, there is still quite a way to go.”

Progress and setbacks are facts of life for human rights activists like Gaer, who died Nov. 9 in New York City at age 78. The cause was metastatic breast cancer, AJC said in announcing her death.

As head of the only human rights division within a major Jewish organization, Gaer (who used her maiden name professionally) witnessed gratifying success in advocating for women’s rights, torture victims and the protection of political dissidents around the world, as well as worrisome rebounds for religious intolerance, religiously inspired humans rights violations and autocratic rule.

No matter how such winds were blowing, AJC recalled in a statement, “She effectively advocated for the creation and evolution of numerous international institutions and processes that play a critical role today in monitoring states’ human rights practices and holding violators to account.”

In addition to her role at AJC, Gaer served for nine terms as a “public member” of U.S. government delegations to U.N. meetings between 1993 and 1999. She played a critical role at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing at which the U.N. explicitly recognized for the first time that women’s rights are human rights.

In 1999, Gaer became the first American and first woman to serve on the 10-person United Nations Committee against Torture, when it became an important forum for protecting women, religious minorities and members of the LGBT community from violence.

“Her rigorous and unsparing critiques — and her practice of inquiring about alleged victims of torture and arbitrarily imprisoned lawyers and advocates by name in public meetings — occasionally provoked angry outbursts by government officials accustomed to deferential, non-adversarial treatment in U.N. settings,” the AJC statement recalled. “However, Gaer’s approach turned what might otherwise have been pro-forma exercises into valuable opportunities for advocates to secure formal U.N. recognition of their claims.”

Gaer championed the rights of religious minorities and victims of religious-inspired violence as an independent expert member of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2001-2012.

While she steered the Blaustein Institute to focus on universal rights, the notorious Durban Conference demonstrated to her and the wider Jewish community the degree to which anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment — often indistinguishable — had infected international bodies meant to focus on racism and intolerance. She scored a victory in 1998 when she helped convince U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to declare that the Holocaust was unique and to undertake new U.N. efforts to develop meaningful programs commemorating the genocide.

More recently, she helped alert the U.N. to rising global antisemitism, an effort that culminated in an action plan on antisemitism issued by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief in 2022.

“As a member of Congress, I frequently sought Felice’s expertise on human rights and UN issues,” AJC CEO Ted Deutch, who formerly represented Florida in the U.S. House of Representatives, wrote on X. “At AJC, she taught me so much and reminded us all to approach complex issues with humanity. It is impossible to overstate the impact Felice’s decades of human rights advocacy has had on the lives of so many.”

Gaer was born on June 16, 1946 in Englewood, New Jersey, one of three children of Abraham Gaer, a businessman who owned a toy shop, and his wife Beatrice Etish Gaer. She was raised in Teaneck, New Jersey and attended Teaneck High School.

“I was shaped by all the usual things in a Jewish home,” she told an interviewer in 2023. “First of all, the holidays. Secondly, the values, Jewish values, and awareness, a profound awareness of Jewish history, the history of annihilation, expulsion, discrimination, violence. But also the Jewish values of universality, respect for all human life, equality before the law, sense of realism, sense that you can change your life by what you do, and the choices that you make.”

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College. At Columbia University’s Russian Institute (now Harriman Institute) she received a Master of Arts degree in 1971 and a Master of Philosophy degree in Political Science in 1975.

Gaer became director at the Jacob Blaustein Institute in 1993 after serving as a program officer at the Ford Foundation — focusing on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as arms control and human rights — and later as executive director of the International League for Human Rights from 1982 to 1991. She also served as director of European Programs for the United Nations Association of the USA, an organization that advocates American support for the U.N., from 1992 to 1993.

Gaer chaired the steering committee for the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and received the First Freedom Center’s National Religious Freedom Award in 2010.

In 1975, she married Dr. Henryk Baran, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany. He survives her, as do their two sons — Adam, a filmmaker and curator, and Hugh, a workers’ rights attorney.

In the 2023 interview, she quoted the rabbinic sage Hillel to sum up her approach to human rights: “He said, ‘If I’m not for myself, who will be, and if I’m only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?'”