"Jewish Nobel" Laureate Anish Kapoor Pledges $1m Genesis Prize to Refugee Causes

LONDON, January 17, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

 David Miliband's International Rescue Committee Major Beneficiary of Kapoor's Gift  

The Genesis Prize Foundation (GPF) and 2017 Genesis Prize Laureate and world-renowned artist and human rights activist Anish Kapoor today announced grants to five prominent NGOs engaged in alleviating the global refugee crisis.

     (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629297/Anish_Kapoor.jpg )

The recipient organizations assist refugees globally and include the International Rescue Committee (IRC), led by its president David Miliband, as well as the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees (MFA), HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), Help Refugees, and Hillel International.

The grants are funded by the $1 million Genesis Prize, dubbed the "Jewish Nobel" by TIME Magazine. Anish Kapoor has chosen to focus on refugees as an expression both of his lifelong commitment to supporting excluded people and as an expression of core Jewish values.

The Genesis Prize honors extraordinary individuals who serve as an inspiration to the next generation of Jews through their outstanding professional achievement, and commitment to the Jewish people and Jewish values, such as social justice, tolerance and charity. Laureates of the Genesis Prize include Michael R. Bloomberg (2014), Michael Douglas (2015), Itzhak Perlman (2016), and Natalie Portman (2018). In November 2017, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Genesis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kapoor and The Genesis Prize Foundation have teamed up with the IRC to improve community health services for refugees in northern Uganda and to provide life-saving access to safe water for the Rohingya ethnic minority group in the Rakhine state in Myanmar. Genesis funds will also support the expansion into Italy of Refugee.Info, a digital platform, which harnesses social media and other digital tools to ensure that refugees have access to the critical information they need to make informed decisions about their lives.

Additionally, Kapoor's $1 million Genesis Prize will fund the following activities:

• Providing life-saving winterization to five refugee camps in Greece and a refugee camp in Calais, France, including the funding of food and the most essential winter equipment (through Help Refugees)
• Shipping 36 containers of aid to Syrian refugees (through Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees); the contents of the first two containers that MFA will ship under the Genesis Prize program will have a combined value of $20.7 million in medicines and medical equipment
• Strengthening the capacity of local leaders in communities across America to advocate in support of immigrants and refugees to the U.S. (through HIAS); the amount of the grant was doubled as a result of recent policy debate in Washington aimed at curtailing the number of immigrants and refugees from certain countries that the U.S. would accept in the future
• Bringing thousands of Jewish students and young adult volunteers together to assemble aid packages for 5,000 Syrian refugees (through Hillel International, in collaboration with the Joint Distribution Committee)

These grants come on the heels of an earlier announcement of a major grant from GPF to Ziv hospital in northern Israel to fund hearing restoration for Syrian children brought from the neighbouring conflict zone. The Ziv grant was made in partnership with Israeli philanthropist Morris Kahn.