The International Rescue Committee is deeply saddened by the loss of longtime IRC Overseer Elie Wiesel, who died Saturday at his home in New York. He was 87.

The IRC remembers the legacy of our Chairman Emeritus and longest-serving Board member.

George Rupp will step down at the end of August after 11 years as president of the IRC. In a recent interview with the IRC’s publications director Steven Manning, Rupp reflected on his tenure.

Learn how the International Rescue Committee was founded at the call of physicist, humanitarian -- and refugee -- Albert Einstein.

On Aug 4, 1940, a young editor named Varian Fry boarded a transatlantic flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York on his way to German-occupied France to lead a daring rescue operation.

Albert Einstein is known as a genius, physicist and Nobel Laureate. While his theory of relativity changed the world, it wasn’t his only legacy. He was also a refugee and humanitarian, having inspired the founding of the organization that became the International Rescue Committee.

Only days after Hurricane Katrina destroyed a swath of the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the International Rescue Committee dispatched an emergency team of relief experts to Louisiana. For the first time in its 73-year history, the organization responded to a humanitarian crisis in the United States. 

Over 30 years ago, Sudan’s civil war uprooted 20,000 Sudanese children. They were known as the Lost Boys.