Joel Breman, Who Helped Stop an Ebola Outbreak in Africa, Dies at 87
Part of a team flown in to fight the deadly virus in 1976, Dr. Breman also worked to stamp out tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm.
Joel G. Breman in 2020. In 1976, as an Ebola outbreak spread in Congo, he interviewed patients and witnesses, traveling from village to village and going from house to house in only “the most basic protective equipment.”Credit...ImageAV, via Breman Family
Dr. Joel Breman, a specialist in infectious diseases who was a member of the original team that helped combat the Ebola virus in 1976, died on April 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by his son, Matthew, who said his father died of complications from kidney cancer.
“We were scared out of our wits,” Dr. Breman, recollecting his pioneer mission, told a National Institutes of Health newsletter in 2014, as a new and even deadlier Ebola outbreak raged that year.
Nearly 40 years earlier, his team of five had just landed in the interior of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a remote Roman Catholic mission hospital. They were up against a viral infection that had no name, whose origin was unknown, and that was accompanied by high fever and bleeding that led to a painful and quick death.
Dr. Breman, dispatched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had only what he described to the N.I.H. as “the most basic protective equipment” against the disease, in contrast to the full-body spacesuit-like gear that was standard in the later outbreak. He and others on the team, laboring in intense heat and bitten by sand flies, “developed rashes and didn’t know if we would catch the virus too,” he said.
But he calmly began deploying the techniques he had honed on earlier missions to Africa, on anti-smallpox initiatives in Guinea and Burkina Faso. He interviewed patients and witnesses, traveling from village to village and going from house to house. He and his colleagues, he recalled, soon determined that the infection was “spread by close contact with infected body fluids,” and that it had been propagated at a rural hospital that was using unsterilized needles.
Over a long career, much of it spent at the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes for Health, Dr. Breman worked to stamp out deadly tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm. But that initial Ebola outbreak, he told an interviewer in 2009, “was the scariest epidemic of my entire medical career and possibly of the last century.”
Compared with the later outbreak in West Africa, which lasted more than two years, the Congo (then Zaire) epidemic was quickly contained. There were fewer than 300 deaths, in marked contrast to the more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016. The relative success in 1976 was partly because of Dr. Breman’s efforts to analyze, contain and isolate this frightening new virus.
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For his work in fighting an Ebola outbreak in 1976, Dr. Berman was presented with an award by Dr. Nguete Kikhela, the health minister of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).Credit...via Breman family
“He was my mentor, and he was the leader of the team,” said Dr. Peter Piot, a former director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and himself a pioneering Ebola and AIDS researcher.
“He already had great experience of outbreak investigations and fieldwork,” Dr. Piot continued. “He was a combination of walking encyclopedia and accumulated experience. He had an incredible commitment to solve problems for people, reaching out to people and listening to them.”
Dr. Breman would spend a half-hour or more simply chatting with village notables, about their families and other matters, before getting down to questions about the disease, Dr. Piot said. “He made the connection between human understanding and interaction, and data analysis. He had the human factor.”
Dr. Piot had special praise for Dr. Breman’s demeanor: “He remained calm. This was a pretty stressful time. Lots of people died. He was very patient with me.”
Dr. Breman spent two months in Congo, becoming chief of surveillance, epidemiology and control for the mission. He was then sent by the C.D.C. to help run the World Health Organization’s smallpox program in Geneva.
By 1980, with smallpox effectively eradicated — “one of the greatest triumphs in the history of medicine,” he called it in a Story Corps interview with his son — Dr. Breman began what he called “a new career” running the disease control center’s anti-malaria program.
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Dr. Breman in Ivory Coast in 1986. He spent many years in Africa trying to stamp out deadly tropical diseases like smallpox, malaria and Guinea worm, in addition to Ebola.Credit...via Breman family
At a memorial tribute on April 9, Dr. Rick Steketee, a fellow member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, said that in the years that followed, and through new postings, Dr. Breman “wrote book chapters that guide the medicine and public health practice around the world and edited textbooks that influenced the practice of infectious disease control and elimination, especially in low-resource countries.” Dr. Breman was president of the society in 2020.
Joel Gordon Breman was born on Dec. 1, 1936, in Chicago to Herman Breman, a painting contractor, and Irene (Grant) Breman. When Joel was 7, the family moved to Los Angeles, where his father painted movie sets and his mother bought and sold furniture and property.
Dr. Breman attended Hamilton High School in Los Angeles. He received a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958 and a medical degree from the University of Southern California in 1965. He was awarded a degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1971.
His first assignment overseas was in Guinea, from 1967 to 1969, when the C.D.C. assigned him to run its smallpox eradication program. That mission fueled a lifelong passion for Africa, Matthew Breman said. Numerous scientific trips there followed, often as a consultant to the World Health Organization.
Dr. Breman held a number of senior positions at the National Institutes of Health, from which he retired in 2010 as a senior scientist emeritus.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Vicki; his daughter, Johanna Tzur; and six grandchildren.
“My dad loved helping others and thought it was important to help everyone,” Matthew Breman said. “I think that’s one of the reasons he went into medicine.”
Anne Heyman, Who Rescued Rwandan Orphans, Dies at 52
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Anne HeymanCredit Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
When Anne Heyman learned in 2005 that the genocide in Rwanda had orphaned 1.2 million children, she saw a glimpse of salvation for the country in the experience of Israel.
“It popped out of my head: They should build youth villages,” she told The New York Times last year.
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.
“Israel had a solution to the orphan problem,” Ms. Heyman, a supporter of Jewish causes, told The Jerusalem Post last year. “Without a systemic solution, this is a problem that won’t solve itself.”
Ms. Heyman knew no one in Rwanda and little about the country, but she plowed ahead, raising more than $12 million; recruiting expert help from Rwanda, Israel and the United States; winning the support of the Rwandan government; and acquiring 144 acres in a setting of lakes and hills in eastern Rwanda. She then built a village of 32 houses for orphaned teenagers, setting it high on a hill, she said, “because children need to see far to go far.”
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Anne Heyman, center, with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and the 2012 Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village graduating class.Credit Jenna Merrin
She died on Jan. 31 at a hospital in Delray Beach, Fla., after falling from a horse while competing in a masters jumper competition at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in Wellington, Fla. She was 52.
The cause was cardiac arrest brought on by a head injury, said Marisha Mistry, a spokeswoman for Liquidnet, an Internet stock-trading company founded by Ms. Heyman’s husband, Seth Merrin. Ms. Heyman had homes in Florida, Manhattan, Westchester County, N.Y., and Israel.
When the village for orphans opened in 2008, a long line of teenagers, alone and shattered, stood in the blazing sun holding paper bags containing all their possessions. Entire families of some had been wiped out, and they had no photographs. Some did not know their birthdays, or even what their real names were.
At first, almost all who came had been orphaned by the genocide committed in 1994 by ethnic Hutus against the minority Tutsis and the Tutsis’ moderate Hutu supporters. Later, children of parents who had died of AIDS began arriving. Other vulnerable children were also taken in.
Ethiopian Jews who had grown up at a youth camp in Israel were the first counselors. Housemothers were hired locally to make the houses into homes, often the first the youths had known. Many of the women had lost their husbands and children to genocide.
Today the village houses about 500 youths, who go to high school, work on a farm, learn trades, record gospel music and, most of all, feel a sense of belonging.
The camp was named Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. “Agahozo” is a Kinyarwanda word meaning “a place where tears are dried.” Shalom is Hebrew for peace. Reflecting this thought, residents do not identify themselves along tribal lines.
Ms. Heyman, who made Hebrew the first language of her own children in New York, saw Agahozo-Shalom as an expression of her Zionist ideals.
“It is a way for us to share those values with the non-Jewish world,” she told The Jerusalem Report in 2007.
Emmanuel Nkundunkundiye, 21, a recent graduate of the village school, told the Jewish American newspaper The Forward, “The Holocaust is the same history that we face, the same tragedy.”
Anne Elaine Heyman was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 16, 1961, the second of four children, and was raised in Cape Town. She moved with her family to Boston at 15 and became active in Young Judea, a Zionist youth movement. She spent a year of high school in Israel in a Young Judea program and met her future husband there.
She is survived by him; their sons Jason and Jonathan; their daughter, Jenna; and her parents, Sydney and Hermia Heyman.
Ms. Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, then spent another year in Israel before going to George Washington University Law School. In 1984, she transferred to Columbia Law School and graduated the next year. After two years of private practice, she became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, prosecuting white-collar crime. She quit to devote herself to her family after her son Jonathan was born in 1994.
Ms. Heyman began her career as an activist and philanthropist while at home with her children. She volunteered for Dorot, a Manhattan-based organization that serves the elderly, and became its chairwoman.
One of her first steps in her Rwandan mission was linking up with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had set up youth villages in the Americas, Europe and Africa. Her principal model was the village of Yemin Orde, one of 50 youth villages in Israel. It has taken in orphans and other needy children from around the world.
She also built one of the largest solar energy plants in sub-Saharan Africa; it contributes power to the rest of Rwanda as well.
Ms. Heyman had plans to make the village self-sustaining, so that major western donors, like her husband’s company, would not always be needed.
Called “Mom,” “Grandmother” and an angel by the youths, she came to the village four or five times a year, staying for several days or more.
Agahozo-Shalom’s announcement of Ms. Heyman’s death quoted a Rwandan proverb: “Death is nothing so long as one can survive through one’s children.”
Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (ASYV) is a home for orphans of the genocide and AIDS in Rwanda.[1][2][3] It was originally set up to educate the orphans of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi.[4]
The village was founded by Anne Heyman, who died on 31 January 2014.[5][6] Heyman and her husband, Seth Merrin raised $12 million in order to start the organisation. The couple started the organisation to offer a safe community and high school education for the orphans who were at risk.[7][8] The ASYV was modeled after the Israeli youth villages that were built for Jewish orphans after the Holocaust.[9][10] The first group of students were 125 in December 2008. By 2012 there were 375 students from ages 15 – 21.[11] As of 2017, there are around 500 students from Rwanda.[12][13]
The village provides students a campus with a dining room, high school, health care clinic, homes, workshop spaces, plumbing, internet service, etc.[14] The students study biology, history, math, economics, language, literature, agriculture, music, mechanization, etc.[10][15] As the educators decided that the Entrepreneurship Course by the Government was theoretical, the ASYV partnered with the Mastercard Foundation and TechnoServ for the STRYDE (Strengthening Rural Youth Development through Enterprise) project for the Entrepreneurship Club.[16] Seth Merrin's company, Liquidnet Holdings, has invested staff time and resources at the village, and $2 million for building the village.[17][3] The $23 million solar panel project is built in Rwanda on the land owned by the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.[18][19]
The leaders of the Rwanda districts gives Agahozo Shalom a list of those teenagers who are in need of attending school. The organisation narrows down the list to 200 and visits the students to decide if the village would be a good fit.[10] The organisation is maintained by a structure based on family. "Families" of students in every grade is split up by gender and they receive a "Mama", a Rwandan educator who lives in the house with them, a "big brother" or "big sister", a guidance counselor who visits weekly, and a foreign "cousin" volunteer who stays for a year. The staffs are referred to as "aunts' or "uncles".[12][7] The students begin with the Year of Enrichment so that every students have a similar academic base.[20]
Happy Day: Anne Heyman walks with Rwanda President Paul Kagame at a graduation ceremony at Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, the kibbutz-style school she founded.Image by Courtesy of Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village
Anne Heyman, a pioneering Jewish philanthropist who founded a youth village for victims of the Rwanda genocide, has died in a Florida horse-riding accident. She was 52.
Heyman died after falling from a horse at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in the town of Wellington Friday morning. She was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 1:30 p.m., said Eric Davis, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
Anne Heyman
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“She was a mother to all the children here,” Jean-Claude Nkulikiyimfura, the school’s director, told the Forward from the grief-stricken campus outside the Rwanda capital of Kigali. “Most of them are saying, ‘God, why have you made me an orphan a second time.’”
“Each of us grieves not only for the passing of a tremendous woman and a true visionary, but also for the loss suffered by her family,” said the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in a statement on its web site.
Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and ICT, Jean P. Nsengimana [Tweeted a message][3] of mourning from the government.
“Your legacy will live on forever,” he said. “Our thoughts are with your family and hundreds of youth in Agahozo Shalom Youth Village who just lost a mother.”
Heyman fell off her horse during a master’s jumper competition, Jennifer Wood, spokeswoman for the FTI Consulting Winter Equestrian Festival, told the Palm Beach Post.
“We are very sad to report that a rider fell from her horse today at our facility. EMTs attended to her immediately (but) she passed away,” Wood told the paper.
Heyman, a New York lawyer and Jewish communal activist who was born in South Africa, viewed Israeli kibbutzes that took in Holocaust orphans as a model for coping with the hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by the Rwandan genocide.
Heyman and her husband Seth Merrin created the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village to build a place where Rwandan orphans could go to live, study and help rebuild their country.
ASYV says its model combines three essential elements to encourage our youths’ intellectual and emotional growth: loving support of a family, a structured education and enriching extracurricular program.
In addition to healing thousands of orphans, Heyman aimed to inspire ASYV graduates to serve the community, both locally and globally.
Just two weeks ago, Heyman presided over the school’s graduation ceremony, which also marked the 20th anniversary of the 1994 killing spree in which hundreds of thousands were killed.
Heyman humbly told Rwanda’s New Times paper that the school’s extraordinary team both within and outside the country made the project a success.
“We have support from donors some of them we have never met,” she told the paper.
Heyman graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and from the George Washington School of Law in 1986. After two years in private practice Anne went to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor.
She and her husband were key forces in Dorot, a Jewish charity, and have also served on boards of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in New York, Young Judaea, Tufts University Hillel and the Jewish Community Centers of America, according to the Jewish Federations of North America.
Dave Goldiner is the Forward’s director of digital media. Dave is a veteran journalist who has spent two decades working at newspapers in the United States and Africa. A native New Yorker, Goldiner wrote for the New York Daily News, where he covered some of the biggest stories of our time, including the attacks of September 11, along with thousands of stories of hope and heartbreak. He also studied and worked in Southern Africa and has written for publications in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He holds masters degrees in journalism and public administration from Columbia University. Dave can be reached at goldiner@forward.com, or follow him on Twitter @davegoldiner
