Building a Bridge Between New York and Brazil
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Leona Forman, an engaging beauty with tousled gray hair and searing green eyes, may have been born a Russian Jew in China, but there is no question she was touched by the Brazilian spirit. Starting with her hello kisses on both cheeks, she exudes the warmth and vivacity of Rio de Janeiro, the city where she settled with her family at 13 after a 40-day boat journey from Hong Kong. “It’s where I felt we put down roots, even though I only lived there for 13 years,” said Ms. Forman, 63, who has spent most of her life in New York.
Upon mandatory retirement from a job at the United Nations office of public information on her 60th birthday, Ms. Forman established the Brazil Foundation to give something back to the country that adopted her as a young refugee.
The foundation selects Brazilians doing pioneering work in the areas of citizenship, education, health, culture, and human rights in their home country to provide with small grants to expand their efforts.
This year’s campaign, for example, raised $220,000, mostly from Brazilians living in North America, which was then distributed to 25 projects selected from more than 1,000 applicants, ranging from a technology training program for coffee growers to an institute studying the causes of hunger and malnutrition in northeastern fishermen.
Ms. Forman insists that this type of work is more constructive than charity, which she associates with handouts, even if they are born of genuine generosity.
“Charity in Brazil is pervasive,” Ms. Forman said. “In charity you give because your heart is big and you want to help, but in social investment you want to see your money working, not just funding someone for one day and then they need food again…It is more than just feeding the person, it is providing them with the tools to cope.”
She is determined to connect New York’s financial resources with Brazil’s rising tide of social entrepreneurs, who, she said, “for the first time in history feel empowered to solve their problems.”
While Ms. Forman started the Brazil Foundation, its rapid growth, she says, is thanks to the 800 volunteers the project has recruited in the few years since its founding – from a Brazilian-born lawyer and board member who provided pro-bono services to the hair-dresser who donated her salon profits to the foundation.
The mostly young contributors are part of the growing community of Brazilians in New York, many of whom came looking for economic opportunities in the 1980s and 1990s when the Brazilian economy faltered.
“They feel the need to connect with Brazil despite the distance,” Ms. Forman said. “Without them there would be no Brazil Foundation.”
On a recent morning, as Ms. Forman recounted her journey from China to New York, via Brazil, young women working for the Brazil Foundation darted into the kitchen to ask questions and grab treats. They chatted with Ms. Forman in Portuguese while snacking on quindim, a coconut flan, and banana bread. Her living room bustled with a photo shoot for an upcoming holiday auction fundraiser. Meanwhile, under the bunk bed in her grown son’s room, her only paid New York employee planned an upcoming move to a new office, and a volunteer spread out in the guest room creating a list of multinationals that work in Brazil.
A few weeks ago, at a talk with a leader of the Brazilian women’s labor movement, Ms. Forman announced to another audience gathered at her home – lawyers, writers, students, diplomats, and aid workers – that the foundation was moving to its own office downtown.
The announcement was met with enthusiasm, and then a question, “But will there be pastel?” The query was in jest but also heartfelt, with the Brazilian delicacy hard to find in New York, and rarely as good as Ms. Forman’s.
While Ms. Forman has for many years called herself a Jew whose “religion is gastronomical,” and she has mastered many of Brazil’s traditional recipes, she said she learned her culinary affection from watching the Chinese cooks in the basement kitchen in her childhood home in Tianjin, China, a city four hours southeast of Beijing.
Her grandfather, a wheat supplier, took the family from Odessa in 1905 to join a wave of Jewish traders supplying the builders of the Eastern Chinese railroad.
In China, the family lived in a self-contained enclave of Russian Jews. She learned little Chinese and studied in a Hebrew school until it was banned. But after World War II, “everyone started to leave” and Ms. Forman’s family migrated to Brazil in 1953, one of the few countries open to Jewish refugees.
Ms. Forman’s father, a fur and hide trader in Russia, struggled to find tropical goods to sell in Rio. The move was a difficult adjustment for her parents and they stuck to a small Jewish community, but Ms. Forman flourished. She quickly learned Portuguese and advanced at the Colegio Anglo-Americano, which she said “had nothing of Anglo or Americano,” but was a traditional Brazilian school, graduating at 16.
Just as she embarked on a journalism career in Rio, she took a trip to New York, in 1961, at 21. On that brief voyage, she met a young anthropologist at New York University, Shepard Forman, who was researching Brazil. Five years later, the pair wed and moved to New York.
Now, Ms. Forman’s two grown children are American citizens – one an artist in New York and the other a writer in Los Angeles – but she considers herself Brazilian and is dedicated to improving her adopted homeland.
“We’re not going to solve Brazil’s problems,” Ms. Forman said, but with a move coming up to independent offices outside of Ms. Forman’s home, and an ever-growing list of donors, volunteers, and projects, she glows at the continued expansion of the foundation. “But even if we help just one person, I think that is an enormous satisfaction.”