A00095 - Anne Heyman, Woman Who Rescued Rwandan Orphans
Anne Heyman, Who Rescued Rwandan Orphans, Dies at 52
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Anne HeymanCredit Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
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.”
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.”
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Anne Heyman, center, with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and the 2012 Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village graduating class.Credit Jenna Merrin
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.
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.”
Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (ASYV) is a home for orphans of the genocide and AIDS in Rwanda.[1][2][3] It was originally set up to educate the orphans of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi.[4]
The village was founded by Anne Heyman, who died on 31 January 2014.[5][6] Heyman and her husband, Seth Merrin raised $12 million in order to start the organisation. The couple started the organisation to offer a safe community and high school education for the orphans who were at risk.[7][8] The ASYV was modeled after the Israeli youth villages that were built for Jewish orphans after the Holocaust.[9][10] The first group of students were 125 in December 2008. By 2012 there were 375 students from ages 15 – 21.[11] As of 2017, there are around 500 students from Rwanda.[12][13]
The village provides students a campus with a dining room, high school, health care clinic, homes, workshop spaces, plumbing, internet service, etc.[14] The students study biology, history, math, economics, language, literature, agriculture, music, mechanization, etc.[10][15] As the educators decided that the Entrepreneurship Course by the Government was theoretical, the ASYV partnered with the Mastercard Foundation and TechnoServ for the STRYDE (Strengthening Rural Youth Development through Enterprise) project for the Entrepreneurship Club.[16] Seth Merrin's company, Liquidnet Holdings, has invested staff time and resources at the village, and $2 million for building the village.[17][3] The $23 million solar panel project is built in Rwanda on the land owned by the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.[18][19]
The leaders of the Rwanda districts gives Agahozo Shalom a list of those teenagers who are in need of attending school. The organisation narrows down the list to 200 and visits the students to decide if the village would be a good fit.[10] The organisation is maintained by a structure based on family. "Families" of students in every grade is split up by gender and they receive a "Mama", a Rwandan educator who lives in the house with them, a "big brother" or "big sister", a guidance counselor who visits weekly, and a foreign "cousin" volunteer who stays for a year. The staffs are referred to as "aunts' or "uncles".[12][7] The students begin with the Year of Enrichment so that every students have a similar academic base.[20]
Happy Day: Anne Heyman walks with Rwanda President Paul Kagame at a graduation ceremony at Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, the kibbutz-style school she founded.Image by Courtesy of Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
Anne Heyman, a pioneering Jewish philanthropist who founded a youth village for victims of the Rwanda genocide, has died in a Florida horse-riding accident. She was 52.
Heyman died after falling from a horse at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in the town of Wellington Friday morning. She was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 1:30 p.m., said Eric Davis, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
Anne Heyman
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“She was a mother to all the children here,” Jean-Claude Nkulikiyimfura, the school’s director, told the Forward from the grief-stricken campus outside the Rwanda capital of Kigali. “Most of them are saying, ‘God, why have you made me an orphan a second time.’”
“Each of us grieves not only for the passing of a tremendous woman and a true visionary, but also for the loss suffered by her family,” said the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in a statement on its web site.
Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and ICT, Jean P. Nsengimana [Tweeted a message][3] of mourning from the government.
“Your legacy will live on forever,” he said. “Our thoughts are with your family and hundreds of youth in Agahozo Shalom Youth Village who just lost a mother.”
Heyman fell off her horse during a master’s jumper competition, Jennifer Wood, spokeswoman for the FTI Consulting Winter Equestrian Festival, told the Palm Beach Post.
“We are very sad to report that a rider fell from her horse today at our facility. EMTs attended to her immediately (but) she passed away,” Wood told the paper.
Heyman, a New York lawyer and Jewish communal activist who was born in South Africa, viewed Israeli kibbutzes that took in Holocaust orphans as a model for coping with the hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by the Rwandan genocide.
Heyman and her husband Seth Merrin created the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village to build a place where Rwandan orphans could go to live, study and help rebuild their country.
ASYV says its model combines three essential elements to encourage our youths’ intellectual and emotional growth: loving support of a family, a structured education and enriching extracurricular program.
In addition to healing thousands of orphans, Heyman aimed to inspire ASYV graduates to serve the community, both locally and globally.
Just two weeks ago, Heyman presided over the school’s graduation ceremony, which also marked the 20th anniversary of the 1994 killing spree in which hundreds of thousands were killed.
Heyman humbly told Rwanda’s New Times paper that the school’s extraordinary team both within and outside the country made the project a success.
“We have support from donors some of them we have never met,” she told the paper.
Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and from the George Washington School of Law in 1986. After two years in private practice Anne went to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor.
She and her husband were key forces in Dorot, a Jewish charity, and have also served on boards of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York, Young Judaea, Tufts University Hillel and the Jewish Community Centers of America, according to the Jewish Federations of North America.
Dave Goldiner is the Forward’s director of digital media. Dave is a veteran journalist who has spent two decades working at newspapers in the United States and Africa. A native New Yorker, Goldiner wrote for the New York Daily News, where he covered some of the biggest stories of our time, including the attacks of September 11, along with thousands of stories of hope and heartbreak. He also studied and worked in Southern Africa and has written for publications in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He holds masters degrees in journalism and public administration from Columbia University. Dave can be reached at goldiner@forward.com, or follow him on Twitter @davegoldiner
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