Sheppie G. Abramowitz, who played a leading role with the International Rescue Committee and had a second career representing colleges and universities in Washington, died April 7 from an aortic aneurysm at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington.
The longtime Washington resident was 88.
“Since the 1960s, Sheppie was a pillar of the IRC community, dedicated to improving the lives of refugees and facilitating the support of people displaced by conflict and crisis worldwide,” according to a statement from the IRC announcing her death.
“Her extraordinary commitmentto IRC forever shaped the organization and left a lasting impact on all those she crossed paths with … Sheppie was a force but always worked to achieve her goals with warmth, kindness, and a low-key yet highly persuasiveand effective leadership style.”
Kay Bellor, a former vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, recently renamed Global Refugee, in Baltimore, worked with Mrs. Abramowitz at IRC for years.
“When you were with Sheppie, you knew she moved in the highest circles,” Ms. Bellor said. “She was open-hearted, generous and her work was about advocacy for refugees. She worked so hard to keep the arms and door open. She was truly one of a kind.”
“I’ve known her all of my life, and my late wife Gretchen, had been friends with Sheppie since first grade at Park School,” said Sam Feldman, a past president of the school’s Board of Trustees. “She was a dynamo and a very, very smart activist both in Baltimore, Washington, and internationally. She believed that refugees are what makes our country vibrant.”
Sheppie Gouline Glass, daughter of Benjamin C. Glass, proprietor of a record store in downtown Baltimore, and Ida Glass, librarian at Baltimore City College, was born in Baltimore and raised in Forest Park.
After graduating in 1953 from The Park School, she earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1957 from Bryn Mawr College and then spent a year at the University of Madrid, teaching Spanish and English.
The next year she returned home to Baltimore.
In a 2002 interview for the Edmund S. Muskie Oral History Collection at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, Mrs. Abramowitz attempted to explain why she had gone to Washington seeking a job.
“I can’t remember why. I just had an idea that I wanted to work in Washington,” she told interviewer Don Nicoll. “I had been interested in politics in college, and just did it.”
Mrs. Abramowitz wandered into the office of a liberal Democratic Maine congressman, Frank Coffin, who later became a federal judge, and took a job as a file clerk.
“This was in 1958, I guess. Most women didn’t really anticipate having some big deal job, I thought I would get a job, be on the ground floor, good congressman, and see what would happen,” she explained in the Batesinterview.
The year 1959 proved to be a pivotal year in the young woman’s life.
At a Georgetown party — “Where else do you meet?” she told the old Sunday Sun Magazine in a 1966 interview — she met Morton I. Abramowitz, a rising star in the State Department, who had a background in Chinese studies at Stanford and Harvard universities, and who was being sent to the Far East.
They fell in love, married three months later, and went abroad for when Mr. Abramowitz was posted to Taiwan for his first Foreign Service assignment.
In 1963 they went to Hong Kong, where she started volunteering for the IRC teaching English, and two years later, returned to Washington, where she re-entered politics and became head of federal regulations for the California State University system.
She also became a lobbyist for the State University of New York and the University of Cincinnati.
She supported the work of her husband, who later became U.S. Ambassador to Thailand and Turkey, and as the wife of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, served as director of the State Department’s family liaison office.
Mrs. Abramowitz’s interest in refugees went back to her childhood home in Forest Park, where her family welcomed Jewish refugees who had survived World War II.
“My mother worked for refugees in the second World War,” she told The New York Times in 1999. “I come by this very rightly.”
During her five decades with IRC, Mrs. Abramowitz, who had established the IRC’s Washington office, served as the organization’s vice president of government relations, special adviser and family liaison director.
She and her husband also worked tirelessly to save refugees from the Vietnamese and Cambodia refugee crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Mrs. Abramowitz often sought the help of her younger brother Philip Glass, the noted composer and pianist who lives in New York City, for IRC fundraisers.
“She was an activist, even as a young person,” said Mr. Glass. “She went around with people who were trying to work things out. She didn’t want to be seen doing it, but I saw her do it. She wanted to affect something in the world.”
Known for her slouch-brim signature red hats, Mrs. Abramowitz was a force to be reckoned with in official Washington.
“I’m shamelessly squeezing people I know in the administration,” she told The New York Times in regard to the Balkans refugee crisis. “I hope I have a sense of propriety and don’t overdo it.”
“Some people talk past you, but Sheppie was very serious when she spoke to you. You never felt she was distracted, and that you were the only person in her orbit,” Ms. Bellor said. “She was brilliant, smart and strategic when it came to working on issues.”
“But Mrs. Abramowitz, a lean, scrappy figure with salt-and-pepper hair, has the larger reputation of canny pest and benevolent fixer,” observed The Times.
During a refugee crisis in Turkey, Mrs. Abramowitz said in the 2002 oral history, someone said, “Keep Abramowitz out of our country because there’s always a refugee crisis.”
She retired from the IRC in 2004.
“There was no cause more dear to my mother than supporting refugees, and no organization more important to her than the International Rescue Committee,” her son, Michael Abramowitz, of Chevy Chase, said in the IRC statement. “Sheppie Abramowitz believed passionately that the IRC was the best vehicle to save lives and protect refugees, and she worked her whole life to strengthen its ability to fulfill its mission.”
In addition to her refugee work, Mrs. Abramowitz was actively engaged in Democratic politics and had been on thestaff of MaineSen. Edmund Muskie’s 1972 presidential campaign.
Mrs. Abramowitz, who lived in Foggy Bottom, was a ballet enthusiast and enjoyed attending performances of the American Ballet Theatre and the New York Ballet.
“I think that’s why she lived at Foggy Bottom, because she could walk to the Kennedy Center,” said her son, a former Washington Post editor who is now head of Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization.
She also liked spending summers at a home she shared with her brother in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Mrs. Abramowitz was a former member of Temple Sinai in Washington where services were held April 10.
In addition to her husband, who became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and co-founder of the International Crisis group, her son and her brother, Mrs. Abramowitz is survived by a daughter, Rachel Abramowitz of Los Angeles; and three grandchildren.
