Andrew Silow-Carroll writes for JTA<\/a>:<\/p>\n Rebecca Heller awarded Charles Bronfman Prize for work providing free legal services to those fleeing war, persecution.<\/p>\n John Oliver was in the audience Monday night for the awarding of The Charles Bronfman Prize, and here\u2019s the crazy thing \u2013 he may not have been the coolest or even funniest person in the room.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because the honoree at the Manhattan ceremony was Rebecca Heller, the director and co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which wrangles law students and pro bono attorneys to provide legal assistance to refugees.<\/p>\n The Charles Bronfman Prize, established in honor of the philanthropist by his children, honors Jews under 50 who distinguish themselves in humanitarian work. As Rosalie Silberman Abella, justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, put it in her introductory remarks, Heller represents the \u201calchemy of passion, fearlessness, resoluteness, entrepreneurship \u2026 and feistiness\u201d shared by previous prizewinners.<\/p>\n Heller was at Yale Law School when she travelled to Israel in 2008. In neighboring Jordan, she met with refugees from Iraq and realized in order to navigate a \u201cdeeply entrenched\u201d and patchwork system of resettlement, they needed \u2013 what else \u2014 a good lawyer. The student organization she founded upon her return became IRAP, which has provided legal assistance to more than 10,000 refugees and claims an 85 percent success rate with resettlement. (Oliver featured an IRAP client, an Afghani translator stranded after assisting US forces, on his HBO show \u201cLast Week Tonight.\u201d)<\/p>\n Among those resettled by IRAP was Farah Al-Khafaji, who spoke at the Manhattan ceremony. An Iraqi, Al-Khafaji and her father started an engineering and construction company that assisted American forces in building helipads, roads and security barriers in the wake of the 2003 invasion. This, as you\u2019d imagine, was not a universally popular vocation in Iraq, and in 2006 she was assaulted, her father was kidnapped, and her husband was killed.<\/p>\n After waiting almost six years for the US to award sanctuary to her and her two children, Al-Khafaji had almost given up hope when she heard about Heller and IRAP. Heller got her an interview at the US Embassy, a safe home in Baghdad and eventually a one-way flight to Washington Dulles International Airport.<\/p>\n \u201cMy boys and myself would be dead and buried in Iraq\u201d without IRAP, she said at the award ceremony.<\/p>\n In an on-stage conversation with publishing titan Tina Brown, Heller came across less like a global crusader than, I don\u2019t know, a writer for Oliver\u2019s show. (Oliver laughed as loudly as anybody in the audience.)<\/p>\n She recalled a colleague\u2019s advice on making IRAP more professional: \u201c\u2018We need a better intake system than running into me on the street.\u2019\u201d She described how the US would reject the claims of Iraqi asylum seekers because of dubious charges leveled against them during Saddam Hussein\u2019s reign of terror \u2014 compounding their suffering because we \u201cforgot to burn down the Iraqi Ministry of Justice.\u201d<\/p>\n And she ridiculed the torturous screening process that makes refugees from Syria, Africa and Colombia have to prove, over and over again, that \u201cthe worst thing that ever happened to you happened.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd this is the way we are saving people,\u201d she deadpanned.<\/p>\n The award ceremony, postponed from last year so Heller could give birth to her daughter, took place in the genteel surroundings of the New York Historical Society. Meanwhile, a nasty and often misinformed national debate rages on immigration and refugees. Heller, who described herself as an \u201cintensely neurotic and self-critical Jew,\u201d decried the \u201cfalse conflation between terrorism and refugees\u201d and tied her work to Jewish history.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s refugees are no different from those who wandered from \u201cport to port\u201d during World War II seeking safe harbor, she said. \u201cWhat\u2019s different is that we are calling them terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n Lest anyone fail to make that connection, Justice Abella described her Jewish family\u2019s story. Her father survived Theresienstadt, her mother Buchenwald. Her father, a lawyer, was appointed by the Americans as head of legal services at the displaced persons camp where Abella was born.<\/p>\n Abella recalled when Eleanor Roosevelt visited the DP camp, and Jacob Silberman got to offer an official greeting. \u201cThese few children are our fortune, and our sole hope for the future,\u201d he told the first lady.<\/p>\n \u201cI was one of those children,\u201d said his daughter, the first Jewish woman to sit on Canada\u2019s high court.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Mike emails: “How appropriate. The Bronfman family has gone from bootlegging booze during prohibition to honoring human bootleggers today.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She doesn’t feel any need to bring them to Israel. Only the West must absorb these refugees. Physiognomy is destiny. These are the women destroying Western civilization. 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