Advocate for refugees Sheppie Abramowitz
Volunteer could be ‘relentless’ in helping resettle displaced people
Sheppie Abramowitz, who helped resettle displaced people from around the world as a volunteer, adviser and eventual vice president for the International Rescue Committee, opening the organization’s D.C. office and emerging as a go-to resource for refugee issues, died April 7 at a hospital in Washington. She was 88.
The cause was an infection and aortic aneurysm, said her son, Michael Abramowitz, a former Washington Post journalist who leads the pro-democracy organization Freedom House.
A prodigious networker with an oversize Rolodex, Abramowitz leveraged her Washington connections on behalf of refugees from Kosovo to Cambodia, working the phone and crisscrossing the Hill to rally support for displaced people. Dealing with politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats or aid workers, she could be low-key and gracious one moment, blunt and cajoling the next, often while wearing one of her signature brightly colored hats.
“I’m shamelessly squeezing people I know in the administration,” she told New York Times reporter Francis X. Clines in 1994, discussing her work on behalf of refugees from the Balkans. “I hope I have a sense of propriety and don’t overdo it.”
By all accounts, she knew “precisely when to overdo it,” as Clines put it, developing a reputation as a “canny pest and benevolent fixer” while cutting through red tape to enhance refugee services and funding.
“She was relentless in going out and engaging everyone, from the most junior Hill staffers to the most senior administration officials, on what the issues were and what needed to be done,” said George Biddle, a former executive vice president of the International Rescue Committee.
Formed in 1933 to help refugees from Nazi Germany, the IRC now works in more than 50 countries, aiding in relief efforts and helping families resettle and integrate into their new home. Abramowitz initiated the New York-based organization’s full-time presence in Washington, and beginning in 1991 she worked for a decade as vice president of government relations.
For years, “Go see Sheppie, she’ll get it done,” was a familiar refrain from IRC executives including Robert P. DeVecchi and Reynold Levy, who relied on Abramowitz to build relationships and open doors in the capital, according to Biddle.
“She educated, guided and encouraged a whole cadre of humanitarian workers,” he added in a phone interview.
At times, Mrs. Abramowitz enlisted her younger brother Philip Glass, the renowned composer and pianist, for IRC fundraisers. She had inherited her interest in humanitarian issues from their mother, who opened the family’s Baltimore home to Jewish refugees in the aftermath of World War II, and embraced refugee work while living overseas with her husband, diplomat Morton I. Abramowitz, who became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-founded the International Crisis Group.
“I was unformed, and refugees became a passion,” Abramowitz said of her early years in the field.
In the 1960s, while pregnant with her first child and in Hong Kong on one of her husband’s early diplomatic postings, she started volunteering for the IRC, helping Chinese refugees learn “hotel English” to get jobs. A decade later, while in Thailand during Morton Abramowitz’s stint as U.S. ambassador in the country, she organized a group of embassy wives to provide help to the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing violence, famine and regime change in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Abramowitz remained involved with the IRC for more than 50 years, although she also worked from inside the federal government during the Reagan administration, serving as a coordinator between aid organizations and the State Department’s bureau for refugee programs.
Her boss at the time, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Arthur E. “Gene” Dewey, called her “a tireless cheerleader” for relief efforts, including those involving refugees from Lebanon, El Salvador and Mozambique. “Her exhortations and inspiration were not driven by identity politics,” he said in an email. “She simply saw problems that needed fixing, and she gave us little peace until we fixed them.”
The oldest of three children, Sheppie Glass was born in Baltimore on Dec. 17, 1935. She was named after her maternal uncle, Shepard, who died before Abramowitz was born. Her father ran a record store, and her mother was an English teacher who became a high school librarian.
After graduating from the private Park School in Baltimore, Abramowitz studied history at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1957. She worked as a congressional aide for Rep. Frank Coffin, D-Maine, before marrying Morton “Mort” Abramowitz in 1959 and soon joined him overseas at his first diplomatic posting, in Taiwan.
For the next seven years, she supported her husband and his work in East Asia while also starting a family and beginning her humanitarian efforts.
Survivors include her husband, of Washington; two children, Michael of Chevy Chase, Md., and Rachel of Los Angeles; her brother Philip Glass of Manhattan; and three grandchildren.
After Abramowitz and her husband returned to Washington, in 1966, she joined the 1970 presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, and became a lobbyist for colleges and universities, representing schools including the State University of New York, the University of Cincinnati and the California State University System.
But humanitarian work remained a focus, especially after her stint in Thailand. When her husband was stationed in Vienna in the mid-1980s, she worked with refugees in transit; when he was dispatched to Turkey a few years later as U.S. ambassador, she advocated for Kurdish refugees in the region.
Colleagues joked that wherever the couple went, trouble seemed to follow. “Finally someone said, ‘Keep Abramowitz out of our country,’” she recalled in a 2002 oral history, “‘because [there’s] always a refugee crisis.’ “