New York Times: Obituary of Helen Haje 
January 15, 1998  

Helen Haje, 74; Championed Arab-Americans  

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.  

Helen Haje, a Washington public relations woman who championed Arab-American interests with such good-natured fervor that she became gadfly and godmother to the Arab-American movement in the United States, died Jan. 12 at a hospital near her home in Washington. She was 74.  

Her family said the cause was congestive heart failure.  

The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Mrs. Haje, who grew up in Altoona, Pa., and married a local Lebanese-American businessman, seemed content with her role as a traditional American housewife and mother.  

But when her husband, Albert, died at the age of 33 in the early 1940s, leaving her with three young children, she pulled up stakes, moved to Washington and went to work, first as a secretary for Catholic Charities and later as an independent public relations woman.  

Had it not been for the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and a resulting wave of Arab stereotypes that swept the United States, Mrs. Haje might have remained a conventional public relations woman, representing commercial and other clients.  

In a land of immigrants where ethnic and national societies abound, there had been virtually no Arab-American organizations in the United States, but in the wake of the 1967 war, many prominent Arab-Americans saw the need for a concerted effort both to counter the demonizing stereotypes and to lobby for policies favorable to their often-embattled homelands.  

Through her long work with the Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church in Bethesda, Md., Mrs. Haje had gotten to know and impress many of Washington's leading Arab-American figures, and in 1972 when a group of them formed the National Association of Arab-Americans as the first political Arab-American organization, Mrs. Haje suddenly found herself in the forefront of a movement.  

Volunteering to become the group's first executive secretary, she operated the organization for its first few years, first from her home and later at a small office.  

Although it was her typing skills that most benefited the organization in its formative stages, the association's founders, many of them unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, soon found her public relations expertise even more invaluable.  

Over the next years, Mrs. Haje, a gregarious woman with a wide circle of friends and a bulging file of telephone numbers, continually amazed Arab-American leaders and visiting Arab diplomats with the ease with which she could put them in touch with prominent journalists and newscasters, many of whom were, in turn, equally amazed with the ease with which she could ferret out and secure them interviews with obscure Arab officials or Arab-American scholars, lawyers and business leaders.  

Mrs. Haje did not know every one of the estimated 3 million Arab-Americans in the United States. It just sometimes seemed she did. Although Lebanese-Americans, who account for a third of the total, are the most populous Arab group in the United States, Mrs. Haje recognized and celebrated the common bond among Americans from Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and other Arab countries.  

Mrs. Haje, who also served as a bridge between Arab-American organizations, eventually worked so closely with so many of them, including the Arab-American Discrimination Committee and the Arab-American University Graduates Association, that Dr. Clovis Maksud, the Lebanese-born former head of the Arab League, called her the "mother" of most of the Arab-American organizations in the United States.  

"At a moment of great despair among Arab-Americans," Maksud said Wednesday, "she helped mobilize and organize the community."  

For all her devotion to her ancestral home in Lebanon and to other Arab countries, Mrs. Haje was a thorough-going American who emphasized the need for Arab-American leaders to criticize their homelands' governments when their actions 
warranted it.  

And for all her work for Arab-Americanism, Mrs. Haje was first and last a public relations woman. In her later years, her clients had included Bice, a trendy Washington restaurant.  

Her survivors include two sons, Charles, of Destin, Fla., and Albert Jr., of Washington; a daughter, Sharyn Corry of Middleburg, Va.; two sisters, four brothers and two grandchildren. 


Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company