As the Jewish community dwindled, over successive waves of emigration (the last in 1968), the WJC saw Poland as an important repository of Jewish history as well as the custodians of the killing grounds in which much of European Jewry fell victim to the German Final Solution. In 1979, the Polish government and the WJC worked to have Auschwitz placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as site of genocide. The organization repeatedly pressed Poland to ensure that in Auschwitz and other Nazi German death camp sites, the memory of the Jews who had been the main victims, would not be subsumed in collective memory. As such, at the end of the 1980s, the organization was deeply involved in the struggle to have the Carmelite convent that had been established on its ground removed. Rabbi David Rosen of the Anti-Defamation League noted at the time: "To some extent the WJC did determine the tune. Their style created the atmosphere in which no public Jewish organization could not get involved. Had the WJC not got involved, those issues might not have developed in the way they did."