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Sheppie Abramowitz, a consummate political insider who grew to become a strong ally for refugees all over the world, died on April 7 in Washington. She was 88.
Her dying was confirmed by her son, Michael Abramowitz, who stated his mom died at Sibley Memorial Hospital, from an an infection and an aortic aneurysm.
For greater than 5 many years, Ms. Abramowitz was energetic in actions to unravel refugee crises — in Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Kosovo. With a agency, cajoling and unusually efficient hand, she used her deep data of presidency officers, logistics and the struggles of these fleeing struggle and oppressive governments, to safe actual reduction.
She was a diplomat’s spouse — her husband, Morton I. Abramowitz, was a U.S. ambassador — and have become his humanitarian adjunct, bringing her data to bear after they returned to Washington from overseas.
Ms. Abramowitz established a Washington workplace for the International Rescue Committee, one of many world’s main refugee help organizations, and have become a vice chairman. Even earlier than that, she had lengthy been a passionate voice for refugees, volunteering for the I.R.C. whereas her husband was posted in Hong Kong within the Nineteen Sixties.
“Sheppie Abramowitz was an inspiration to generations,” David Miliband, the president and chief govt of the I.R.C., stated on social media.
In 1979, she went to the Thailand-Cambodia border to go to refugee camps for victims of the Khmer Rouge, an expertise that the previous Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, who accompanied her as a university pupil, described as “wrenching and stunning” in a latest e mail to her son. Her husband performed a key position in persuading the Thai authorities to just accept Cambodian refugees throughout his tenure as ambassador from 1978 to 1981.
The following decade, Ms. Abramowitz grew to become the nongovernmental group coordinator for the Bureau for Refugee Programs on the U.S. State Department, a job wherein she grew to become “a tireless cheerleader” for refugees, Gene Dewey, the previous assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, wrote in an e mail to her son.
She joined the I.R.C. in 1991. By 1999, Migration World journal was describing her in a headline as a “crusader for refugees.” In an interview with the journal, she spoke concerning the wants of Kosovo’s Albanian refugees, emphasizing the significance of safety, shelter, sanitation and water tasks in addition to group medical help.
The publication known as her “amongst a handful of officers who really perceive refugee points on the subject degree and who can parlay that data into serving to impact coverage.”
It added that Ms. Abramowitz used “a Rolodex thick with the telephone numbers of diplomats, administrative staff, excessive officers and reduction group contacts” to assist refugees and navigate the troublesome labyrinth of presidency purple tape.
The plight of refugees “is a ardour for each of us,” Ms. Abramowitz advised the journal, referring to her husband.
“Her defining position was to attempt to bend the U.S. political system towards a extra ethical, humanitarian method to refugee issues,” Mr. Geithner stated in an interview.
Ms. Abramowitz was not apologetic about utilizing her insider standing on behalf of refugees, telling The New York Times in 1999, “I’m shamelessly squeezing individuals I do know within the administration.”
Sheppie Glass was born in Baltimore, on Dec. 17, 1935, the daughter of Benjamin and Ida (Gouline) Glass. Her father ran a file retailer downtown, and her mom was the librarian at a highschool, Baltimore City College. Her mom was additionally a volunteer in serving to to resettle World War II-era refugees, a ardour that impressed her daughter.
Sheppie attended The Park School of Baltimore and graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a level in historical past in 1957. The subsequent yr, she went to work for Representative Frank Coffin of Maine, a liberal Democrat, and he or she married Mr. Abramowitz, who was by then working for the State Department, in 1959. Soon after, Mr. Abramowitz was posted to Taipei, Taiwan, the place they lived till 1963.
She later labored for Senator Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine, throughout his 1972 presidential marketing campaign, a incontrovertible fact that was later held towards her husband by Republicans who efficiently blocked President Ronald Reagan’s try to appoint him ambassador to Indonesia in 1982.
While working within the State Department’s refugee workplace within the ’80s, she performed a key position in making certain that the federal authorities accepted as truth a controversial report on the murderous right-wing guerrilla group RENAMO in Mozambique, one thing that “by no means would have occurred” with out her intervention, the report’s writer, Robert Gersony, stated in a message to her son.
In 1994, when Mr. Gersony wrote a report pointing the finger at President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for his regime’s bloodbath of 1000’s 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.
In addition to her husband and son, Ms. Abramowitz is survived by her daughter, Rachel; her brother, Philip Glass, the composer; and three grandchildren.
In his eulogy for her, her son recalled each Ms. Abramowitz’s forcefulness and attain. The I.R.C. obtained a report {that a} wedding ceremony party in Afghanistan had been strafed by American plane. A colleague advised submitting a report back to the Pentagon.
“But Sheppie was having none of that,” he stated. “She handed Mark” — the I.R.C. colleague — “the cellphone quantity for the deputy Secretary of Defense, whom she’d simply seen at a party the earlier night time, and stated, ‘Report it to him.’”
