Sheppie Abramowitz, a consummate political insider who become a formidable best friend for refugees world wide, died on April 7 in Washington. She used to be 88.
Her dying used to be showed via her son, Michael Abramowitz, who mentioned his mom died at Sibley Memorial Health center, from an weakness and an aortic aneurysm.
For greater than 5 a long time, Ms. Abramowitz used to be lively in actions to unravel refugee crises — in Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Kosovo. With a company, cajoling and strangely efficient hand, she old her deep wisdom of presidency officers, logistics and the struggles of the ones absconding warfare and oppressive governments, to accumulation actual leisure.
She used to be a diplomat’s spouse — her husband, Morton I. Abramowitz, used to be a U.S. ambassador — and become his humanitarian adjunct, bringing her wisdom to undergo once they returned to Washington from in another country.
Ms. Abramowitz established a Washington administrative center for the Global Rescue Committee, one of the crucial international’s eminent refugee support organizations, and become a vice chairman. Even ahead of that, she had lengthy been a passionate tonality for refugees, volunteering for the I.R.C. hour her husband used to be posted in Hong Kong within the Sixties.
“Sheppie Abramowitz was an inspiration to generations,” David Miliband, the president and prominent govt of the I.R.C., mentioned on social media.
In 1979, she going to the Thailand-Cambodia border to consult with refugee camps for sufferers of the Khmer Rouge, an enjoy that the previous Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, who accompanied her as a faculty pupil, described as “wrenching and shocking” in a contemporary e mail to her son. Her husband performed a key position in persuading the Thai govt to simply accept Cambodian refugees all the way through his tenure as ambassador from 1978 to 1981.
Refer to decade, Ms. Abramowitz become the nongovernmental group coordinator for the Bureau for Refugee Systems on the U.S. Order Section, a task by which she become “a tireless cheerleader” for refugees, Gene Dewey, the previous worker secretary of climate for the Bureau of Family, Refugees and Migration, wrote in an e mail to her son.
She joined the I.R.C. in 1991. By way of 1999, Migration International brochure used to be describing her in a headline as a “crusader for refugees.” In an interview with the brochure, she spoke in regards to the wishes of Kosovo’s Albanian refugees, emphasizing the virtue of safety, safe haven, sanitation and H2O tasks in addition to folk clinical support.
The newsletter known as her “among a handful of officials who truly understand refugee issues at the field level and who can parlay that knowledge into helping effect policy.”
It added that Ms. Abramowitz old “a Rolodex thick with the phone numbers of diplomats, administrative workers, high officials and relief organization contacts” to assistance refugees and navigate the tough labyrinth of presidency purple tape.
The plight of refugees “is a passion for both of us,” Ms. Abramowitz instructed the brochure, relating to her husband.
“Her defining role was to try to bend the U.S. political system toward a more moral, humanitarian approach to refugee problems,” Mr. Geithner mentioned in an interview.
Ms. Abramowitz used to be now not apologetic about the usage of her insider condition in the name of refugees, telling The Brandnew York Occasions in 1999, “I’m shamelessly squeezing people I know in the administration.”
Sheppie Glass used to be born in Baltimore, on Dec. 17, 1935, the daughter of Benjamin and Ida (Gouline) Glass. Her father ran a file bind downtown, and her mom used to be the librarian at a highschool, Baltimore Town School. Her mom used to be additionally a volunteer in serving to to resettle International Warfare II-era refugees, a keenness that impressed her daughter.
Sheppie attended The Ground College of Baltimore and graduated from Bryn Mawr School with some extent in historical past in 1957. The after era, she going to paintings for Consultant Frank Coffin of Maine, a liberality Democrat, and he or she married Mr. Abramowitz, who used to be via nearest running for the Order Section, in 1959. Quickly later, Mr. Abramowitz used to be posted to Taipei, Taiwan, the place they lived till 1963.
She then labored for Senator Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine, all the way through his 1972 presidential marketing campaign, a incontrovertible fact that used to be then held in opposition to her husband via Republicans who effectively opposed President Ronald Reagan’s struggle to nominate him ambassador to Indonesia in 1982.
Year running within the Order Section’s refugee administrative center within the ’80s, she performed a key position in making sure that the government permitted as truth a debatable file at the murderous right-wing guerrilla team RENAMO in Mozambique, one thing that “never would have happened” with out her intervention, the file’s creator, Robert Gersony, mentioned in a message to her son.
In 1994, when Mr. Gersony wrote a file pointing the finger at President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for his regime’s bloodbath of hundreds of Hutus within the wake of the anti-Tutsi genocide, “Sheppie alone was standing up for me,” Mr. Gersony wrote.
Ms. Abramowitz retired from the I.R.C. in 2009.
Along with her husband and son, Ms. Abramowitz is survived via her daughter, Rachel; her brother, Philip Glass, the composer; and 3 grandchildren.
In his eulogy for her, her son recalled each Ms. Abramowitz’s forcefulness and achieve. The I.R.C. gained a file {that a} marriage ceremony birthday celebration in Afghanistan have been strafed via American plane. A worker advised filing a report back to the Pentagon.
“But Sheppie was having none of that,” he mentioned. “She handed Mark” — the I.R.C. worker — “the cellphone number for the deputy Secretary of Defense, whom she’d just seen at a party the previous night, and said, ‘Report it to him.’”
