By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — In this world of hyper-narcissism, digital obsession, and, yes, endemic contempt for the miraculous redemption that Israel happens to be, the premature death of Anne Heyman has gone largely unnoticed. It’s not like unlike the manner in which Israel’s undeniable flaws have been co-opted to service its global haters even as its uncommon post-genocidal achievements and its stunning humanitarian breakthroughs have been easy prey along the easier path of hate and resentment.
But this is not about Israel or Palestine or terrorism or refugees or even the hypocrisies and intransigency of both sides in that intractable conflict that will likely never be resolved. It’s about a woman, a young mother, an authority, a dreamer, who didn’t distinguish among children based upon their color, language, or demographic footprints. It’s about a former Manhattan district attorney, a Palm Beach mom with a Jewish heart, who saw in what Israel once did for its Holocaust orphans an opportunity to comfort, feed, and nourish the parentless children of Rwanda.
Anne Heyman was killed in a horse-riding accident in Palm Beach on January 31. She was a youthful 52 and is survived by her husband, her parents, three children, and 750 Rwandan orphans who also called her “Mom.”. God must have reasons for these kinds of tragedies; the mourners are left to anguish. The New York Times reported:
“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.”
Heyman, a global pioneer of social justice and compassion, visited the strife-torn Rwanda years ago and was profoundly moved by the plight of the endless hordes of homeless and lost kids crying to themselves in the bloody mix of the nation’s labyrinths of civil war and genocide. She was not only an emotionally responsible human being, she was savvy and professional and structured—in both law and decency.
Tying the Rwandan devastation to the healing Hebrew prophets’ pleas for righteousness, she created an unusual village project called Agahozo-Shalom. Writing this week in The Miami Herald, Barbara Myers, who spent time in the godly village as a counselor, reported:
“Heyman transformed the lives of her charges, children orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and left in the care of older siblings, distant relatives or neighbors. Many of the children had reported abuse and conditions of virtual slavery in the homes of guardians. All reported hopelessness. ..Children lucky enough to be recruited to the village dedicated to drying tears (agahozo) and peace (shalom) joined families of sixteen children headed by a house mother who likely had lost her own children in the genocide. For the first time, the teens reveled in having someone to call ‘mom.’”
The kids were turned from victims to visionaries; they were taught by Israeli volunteers to plow rather than plunder; they were sent to other areas of the country to teach young criminals how to bless bread; some wound up in universities in Canada. It was (and remains) a renewal of the original Zionist covenant—to collect the exiles, to quench the souls of arid wanderers, to bring hope into the hell of too many little lives.
God rest the soul of Anne Heyman, a kind of Jewish Mother Teresa.
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Rabbi Ben Kamin is a freelance writer and author based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com