Anne Heyman, Rwanda Rescuer, Is Dead at 52
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
February 8, 2014
When Anne Heyman learned in 2005 that the genocide in Rwanda had
orphaned 1.2 million children, she saw a glimpse of salvation for the
country in the experience of Israel.
"It popped out of my head: They should build youth villages," she told
The New York Times last year.
Ms. Heyman, a South African-born lawyer who had given up her legal
career in New York to devote herself to philanthropy, was thinking of
how Israel, as a new nation state in the late 1940s, had welcomed and
cared for tens of thousands of children who had been orphaned by the
Holocaust. The Israelis set up residential communities called youth
villages to nurture them.
"Israel had a solution to the orphan problem," Ms. Heyman, a supporter
of Jewish causes, told The Jerusalem Post last year. "Without a
systemic solution, this is a problem that won't solve itself."
Anne Heyman
Ms. Heyman knew no one in Rwanda and little about the country, but she
plowed ahead, raising more than $12 million; recruiting expert help
from Rwanda, Israel and the United States; winning the support of the
Rwandan government; and acquiring 144 acres in a setting of lakes and
hills in eastern Rwanda. She then built a village of 32 houses for
orphaned teenagers, setting it high on a hill, she said, "because
children need to see far to go far."
She died on Jan. 31 at a hospital in Delray Beach, Fla., after falling
from a horse while competing in a masters jumper competition at the
Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in Wellington, Fla. She was
52.
The cause was cardiac arrest brought on by a head injury, said Marisha
Mistry, a spokeswoman for Liquidnet, an Internet stock-trading company
founded by Ms. Heyman's husband, Seth Merrin. Ms. Heyman had homes in
Florida, Manhattan, Westchester County, N.Y., and Israel.
When the village for orphans opened in 2008, a long line of teenagers,
alone and shattered, stood in the blazing sun holding paper bags
containing all their possessions. Entire families of some had been
wiped out, and they had no photographs. Some did not know their
birthdays, or even what their real names were.
Anne Heyman, center, with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and the 2012
Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village graduating class.
At first, almost all who came had been orphaned by the genocide
committed in 1994 by ethnic Hutus against the minority Tutsis and the
Tutsis' moderate Hutu supporters. Later, children of parents who had
died of AIDS began arriving. Other vulnerable children were also taken
in.
Ethiopian Jews who had grown up at a youth camp in Israel were the
first counselors. Housemothers were hired locally to make the houses
into homes, often the first the youths had known. Many of the women
had lost their husbands and children to genocide.
Today the village houses about 500 youths, who go to high school, work
on a farm, learn trades, record gospel music and, most of all, feel a
sense of belonging.
The camp was named Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. "Agahozo" is a
Kinyarwanda word meaning "a place where tears are dried." Shalom is
Hebrew for peace. Reflecting this thought, residents do not identify
themselves along tribal lines.
Ms. Heyman, who made Hebrew the first language of her own children in
New York, saw Agahozo-Shalom as an expression of her Zionist ideals.
"It is a way for us to share those values with the non-Jewish world,"
she told The Jerusalem Report in 2007.
Emmanuel Nkundunkundiye, 21, a recent graduate of the village school,
told the Jewish American newspaper The Forward, "The Holocaust is the
same history that we face, the same tragedy."
Anne Elaine Heyman was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 16,
1961, the second of four children, and was raised in Cape Town. She
moved with her family to Boston at 15 and became active in Young
Judea, a Zionist youth movement. She spent a year of high school in
Israel in a Young Judea program and met her future husband there.
She is survived by him; their sons Jason and Jonathan; their daughter,
Jenna; and her parents, Sydney and Hermia Heyman.
Ms. Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, then
spent another year in Israel before going to George Washington
University Law School. In 1984, she transferred to Columbia Law School
and graduated the next year. After two years of private practice, she
became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, prosecuting
white-collar crime. She quit to devote herself to her family after her
son Jonathan was born in 1994.
Ms. Heyman began her career as an activist and philanthropist while at
home with her children. She volunteered for Dorot, a Manhattan-based
organization that serves the elderly, and became its chairwoman.
One of her first steps in her Rwandan mission was linking up with the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had set up youth
villages in the Americas, Europe and Africa. Her principal model was
the village of Yemin Orde, one of 50 youth villages in Israel. It has
taken in orphans and other needy children from around the world.
She also built one of the largest solar energy plants in sub-Saharan
Africa; it contributes power to the rest of Rwanda as well.
Ms. Heyman had plans to make the village self-sustaining, so that
major western donors, like her husband's company, would not always be
needed.
Called "Mom," "Grandmother" and an angel by the youths, she came to
the village four or five times a year, staying for several days or
more.
Agahozo-Shalom's announcement of Ms. Heyman's death quoted a Rwandan
proverb: "Death is nothing so long as one can survive through one's
children."
(c) 2014 The New York Times Company
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