Rebecca Heller founded the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) in 2008 when she was a law student at Yale. Since then, the nonprofit that provides legal representation to Middle Eastern refugees seeking resettlement has helped relocate 3,000 refugees and provided a total of $10 million in legal aid to people in the Middle East.
It has also decided to change its name — but not its acronym — to International Refugee Assistance Project, reflecting a broadening of its mission.
“The name has worked well. I’m happy having a literal name,” she told the Journal during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “But it’s no longer descriptive of the work that we are doing.”
For her work, which also includes working with policy makers in Washington, D.C., to restructure refugee relocation systems, she received the 2015 Charles Bronfman Prize. The award, which was co-founded by L.A. philanthropists Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Andrew Hauptman, recognizes those younger than 50 who use Jewish values to impact the world and inspire future generations. At 34, Heller is its youngest recipient.
Jill Collier Indyk, executive director of the Bronfman Prize, said Heller’s charm, energy and determination help IRAP be so effective.
“It explains how a young organization can have such a great impact in such a short period of time on a grand scale,” she said. “I think she models all the most wonderful examples of humanity and human rights and Jewish values.”
Heller started IRAP after she took a trip to Israel and decided to spend some additional time in Jordan to meet Iraqi refugees. She met multiple families that told her their biggest problem was navigating the legal obstacles preventing them from resettlement. She returned to law school determined to help people who desperately needed to leave the Middle East.
“For people who are LGBTI or single women who have been trafficked, a lot of the time they’re not that much safer in Jordan than they are in Iraq or Syria, so their only real option is to try to get resettled in a third country,” she said. “And everyone sort of understood that their lives depended on that, but nobody understood how the process worked.”
Since then, Heller has worked on behalf of the most vulnerable refugees in the region. She said IRAP does not have a specific set of criteria that refugees must meet in order to receive help, but trying to help those who are most helpless can get complicated.
“There are some refugees where they are poor, and their lives are bad, but they’re not going to die tomorrow,” she said. “There are other refugees who are poor, and their lives are bad, and someone keeps coming to their house and trying to kill them.”
Heller, now a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School, said most of her clients are at-risk women, LGBTI refugees, children with medical emergencies and people being persecuted because of an affiliation with the United States. Some people in Iraq or Afghanistan are driven from their homes because they work with the U.S. military, government or media.
Congress has a special visa program to help U.S. allies whose lives are at risk, but Heller said it was mismanaged until she helped create legislation to reorganize the program, and as a result, the U.S. government has issued 12,000 additional visas. Each visa is good for an entire family, which means Heller’s legislation helped approximately 40,000 people resettle in the U.S., according to her estimates.
Despite IRAP’s success — which includes chapters at more than two dozen schools that pair law students with pro bono lawyers from top firms — Heller said she fears people can be overwhelmed by the scope of the problem. There are more than 50 million displaced people worldwide, according to the United Nations.
Still, she insisted her cause is not hopeless, as long as the right people approach the situation with the right set of values.
“Just because the situation is really voluminous doesn’t mean there aren’t smart interventions both to help people in individual emergency situations and larger groups of people,” she said. “To write it off as hopeless is to deny that any kind of problem exists. I think the Jewish community, more than anyone, should be hesitant to remain willfully ignorant of a humanitarian crisis.”
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.