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
Maurice El Medioni, Pianist Who Fused Jewish and Arab Music, Dies at 95
An Algerian, he combined the music of his Sephardic roots with Arab traditions, incorporating boogie-woogie and other influences to create a singular style.
Maurice El Medioni grew up in Algeria’s Jewish quarter and spent most of his life as a men’s tailor. It wasn’t until age 68, when he released the album “Café Oran,” that he came to prominence.Credit...via El Medioni family
Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who fused Jewish and Arab musical traditions into a singular style he called “Pianoriental,” died on March 25 in Israel. He was 95.
His death, at a nursing home in Herzliya, on Israel’s central coast, was confirmed by his manager, Yvonne Kahan.
Mr. Medioni was one of the last representatives of a once vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after World War II and proudly drew from both heritages.
In Oran, the Algerian port where he was born, he was sought after by Arabs and Jews alike to play at weddings and at banquets in the years between the war and 1961, when the threat of violence and Algeria’s new independence from France drove Mr. Medioni and thousands of other Jews to flee.
With his bounding octaves, his quasi-microtonal shifts in the style of traditional Arab music, his cheeky rumba rhythms learned from American G.I.s after the 1942 Allied invasion, and his roots in the Jewish-Arab musical heritage called andalous, Mr. Medioni had honed a distinctive piano style by his early 20s.
The singers he accompanied often alternated phrases in French and Arabic in a style known as “Françarabe.” His uncle Messaoud El Medioni was a famous musician known as Saoud L’Oranais, a leading practitioner of andalous, who was deported by the Germans to the Sobibor death camp in 1943 and killed there.
The Medioni style remained buried and nearly forgotten for four decades as Mr. Medioni pursued his trade as a men’s tailor. He kept it alive in private, performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs after he was forced to flee to France. Then, in 1996, when he was 68, he released a breakthrough album, “Café Oran.” Its success led to a belated second life as a star of so-called world music — concert tours in Europe, appearances in documentary films and a major role as mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians anxious to recover the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage.
Mr. Medioni in 1960. A mostly self-taught pianist, he often played at weddings and parties for Muslims and Jews alike.Credit...via El Medioni family
Mr. Medioni has “come to symbolize something, the last of his generation,” said Christopher Silver, a specialist in the Jewish musical tradition of North Africa, who teaches at McGill University in Montreal.
The British radio broadcaster Max Reinhardt wrote in the introduction to the memoir, “Maurice is a compulsive and innately hip musician, always searching for other music and musical styles, part of a group of Muslim and Jewish musicians who quite naturally in the 1940s and ’50s forged a new music togetherin North Africa.”
Two events were decisive in the shaping of Pianoriental, and both occurred early in Mr. Medioni’s life, as he grew up poor in Oran’s Jewish quarter, Derb. (“One shared toilet for our whole floor on which there were six apartments,” he wrote in his memoir.)
The first was his encounter with the American G.I.s in occupied Oran on Nov. 8, 1942, when he was 14. “From the moment the Yanks arrived in Oran, our family’s way of life completely changed,” he wrote.
The Americans introduced him to a rollicking boogie-woogie style that pushed the French pop songs on which he had been raised to the background.
A street-smart young teenager, he became indispensable to the Americans, taking them to bars and brothels.
“I would crisscross the nine piano bars,” Mr. Medioni told an interviewer in 2015. “When one of the pianos was free, I would play all the American hits which I’d learned, and that would attract the G.I.s.”
He recalled being awed by the Black American jazz musicians he saw perform. “I saw them improvise. I was open-mouthed,” he said. “When I came home I would try to reproduce what they did.”
The second decisive event occurred in 1947, when three young Arab musicians walked into a bar where he was drinking, and they all began to sing and play together.
“That was how the first modern Arabic music group was born, a group which would make me the most popular Jewish guy amongst all the Muslims in the whole Orani province,” Mr. Medioni wrote. His synthesis of jazz, boogie-woogie, andalousand Arab rai and chaabi — two forms of Algerian popular music from the streets, in some cases characterized by lengthy narrative song — was born.
“There are few figures that are trying to play this oriental piano,” Mr. Silver said. “Medioni is doing it very well, with the left hand and the right hand. He is trying to update, modernize, and still have it be oriental or Arab music.”
Maurice El Medioni was born on Oct. 18, 1928, in Oran, in what was then French Algeria. His father, Jacob Medioni, ran the Café Saoud with his brother Messaoud and died when Maurice was 7, leaving the boy’s mother, Fany Medioni, to raise four children — three boys and a girl — in poverty.
Mr. Medioni performing in London in 2008.Credit...Andy Sheppard/Redferns, via Getty Images
His musical gifts were apparent early; almost entirely self-taught, he honed his skills on a piano that his brother had brought home from a flea market. The war intensified the family’s hardship, and all the Jewish children were expelled from Oran’s schools by the French authorities. “We were short of everything,” Mr. Medioni wrote.
The invasion by the Americans in 1942 was “a deliverance for all the Jews of North Africa,” he wrote. And by the mid-1950s, he was not only a successful tailor among Oran’s Muslims but also a much sought-after musician, as was his brother Alex. “All the Arab orchestras wanted to work with me,” he wrote. “‘These are our guys,’ is what they used to say.”
But as Algeria’s war of independence intensified, one of his original Arab music partners was shot by revolutionaries, and Mr. Medioni stopped playing at Arab celebrations.
In the spring of 1961, he and his young family boarded a boat for Israel; six months later, they left for France. Years of struggle followed, as Mr. Medioni established tailor shops, first in Paris and then in Marseille. But he continued to play at weddings and galas with stars from the Jewish-Arab North African music scene that had by then been transplanted to France. They included Lili Boniche, Line Monty, Reinette l’Oranaise and Samy Elmaghribi.
At the end of the 1980s, Mr. Medioni recorded himself on a cassette in his living room in Marseille and sent it to a producer at Buda Musique, a specialist record label in Paris. That was the beginning of his revival.
After the “Café Oran” record, there was a concert at the Barbican in London in 2000 with Mr. Boniche; a tour with a well-known British Klezmer band, Oi Va Voi; and an album recorded in New York with the Cuban percussionist Roberto Rodriguez. Mr. Medioni played a leading role in “El Gusto,” a 2012 documentary and album project about the reunion of an orchestra of older Jewish and Arab musicians from Algeria.
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Mr. Medioni, left, in the 2012 film “El Gusto” with the musicians Reda Djillali, Robert Castel and José de Souza.Credit...Jackie King/Quidam Productions
In 2011, he moved to Israel with his wife, Juliette (Amsellem) Medioni, to be close to his children. He continued to record and perform, notably with the Mediterranean-Andalusian Orchestra Ashkelon.
His wife died in 2022. He is survived by his children, Yacov, Marilyne and Michael, and five grandchildren.
Mr. Medioni was acutely aware that he might very well have been the last of his breed. In a 2003 interview in the appendix of his memoir, he told the British musician Jonathan Walton that he doubted andalous would survive him.
“It won’t,” he recalled saying. “Maurice Medioni is telling you that it won’t. It will only be listened to from time to time by people who have some nostalgia, and by youngsters who love their parents.”
