The Brooklyn Waldorf School

US law students help resettle Iraqi refugees

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — As a Christian human rights activist in Iraq, Ban Jamil Yousef Katto lived in fear. Her priest and friends were killed in a church massacre and nearby explosions twice destroyed her apartment in Baghdad.

A documentary filmmaker referred Katto to Becca Heller Brooklyn, N.Y., a recent Yale Law School graduate who started the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project as a student. The group worked with officials to get her family evacuated to Jordan in January and is helping them resettle in the United States.

"Thank God, me and my family, now we are safe," Katto, who is pregnant with her third child, said in a phone interview. "I thank Becca. She assisted so much."

Heller doesn't speak Arabic and acknowledges she's no Middle East expert. But that didn't stop her from starting a group that reports resettling more than 400 Iraqi refugees in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Ireland and Sweden.

"I think it's an excellent initiative," said Larry Yungk, senior resettlement officer with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Washington. "They've been effective. Certainly refugees are here in the United States because of work they did."

IRAP has been especially effective in handling appeals of cases involving refugees rejected for resettlement in the U.S., Yungk said. The student group has won more than 100 cases, Heller said, or 90 percent of their cases.

Yungk said that compares to the traditional success rate of only about 10 percent, crediting their effectiveness to their expertise in American law.

While other groups offer legal assistance to refugees overseas, IRAP says it's the first organization to provide comprehensive legal representation to refugees at all stages of the resettlement process.

A gay doctor said he fled Iraq for Jordan the day he faced an honor killing by his uncles. He said he later fled to another country, where he was arrested, jailed, tortured and raped, and fled back to Jordan to avoid a penalty of 700 floggings in public.

The doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears for the safety of his family still in the Middle East, said he was seeking refugee status in Jordan. The U.N. agency told him he was already resettled in another country, he said, and an interviewer made fun of his sexual orientation.

Heller intervened and contacted the highest managers at the U.N. agency, who apologized and assured him his case would be treated seriously and urgently. The doctor said he was interviewed shortly after that incident and then resettled in the United States.

Foundation Studies Open House « The Brooklyn Waldorf School

What is Foundation Studies?

The Foundation Studies Program offers a transformative journey. We will seek to answer questions… Who we are? What is our relationship to others, to Nature and the being of the Earth? How will we awaken to our right vocation? Where are we in ourselves and the wider world? How can our creative thoughts and deeds influence world happenings and shape the future? It is an inner journey that will bring us to ourselves and bring us out into the world.

“Using our senses through journaling, drawing, painting, dancing, singing, formal presentations, study group chapters: Foundation Studies is a learning course for the whole of my individuality. Echoes from the past, questions for the future, and a deep reverence for the now; Foundation Studies became a way for me to unify my questions, the synchronicities, the murmurs, the inspirations from so many parts of my story—and find my way towards an intuitive way of considering my life’s purposeful tasks.

New York

Merriam-Webster's collegiate encyclopedia

National directory of nonprofit organizations

Understanding Waldorf Education, Teaching from the Inside Out

Stepping left, dance and politics in New York City, 1928-1942