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

London (ots/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