Jan Samuel Francois van Hoogstraten, whose career was spent
aiding refugees and displaced persons during the Cold War as an executive
of American and international agencies, both governmental and volunteer,
died on October 25 at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, NY following a
heart attack. He was 89 and resided at an assisted living facility in
Mount Vernon, NY. He was a former resident of Bronxville, NY,
Croton-on-Hudson, NY and Thompson, CT.

Born in the Netherlands on May 22, 1922, his education at Leiden  
University was interrupted by World War II, when the University was  
closed during the Nazi occupation. After spending the last war years
in hiding after his father, a Dutch civil servant, was forced  
underground, he returned to Leiden and joined the international,  
anti-communist student movement focusing on the plight of displaced  
persons in Europe. He was a founder of the University Asylum Fund
in the Netherlands and worked for World Student Relief and the Tolstoy
Foundation.  From 1952-53, he was the Tolstoy Foundation Middle East
representative based in Amman, Jordan.

He emigrated to the United States in 1953 and became a U.S. citizen  
in 1957. For over two decades, working from its headquarters at 475  
Riverside Drive in New York City, Mr. van Hoogstraten held senior  
positions at Church World Service, the overseas relief and  
reconstruction arm of the National Council of Churches. In 1957 he  
was seconded to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to 
assist thousands in the former Yugoslavia who had fled the failed  
Hungarian revolution. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959,  
he worked extensively on aid to Tibetan refugees in India,  
developing close relationships with the Dalai Lama’s two brothers  
who were representing Tibetan interests in the United States at the  
time. As Director of the Africa Department in the 1960’s and 70’s,  
he oversaw aid distribution to national liberation movements in the  
former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola and in Southern  
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He led Church World Service involvement in 
Joint Church Aid which coordinated international relief efforts to  
end mass starvation in the Nigerian break-away state of Biafra.  
Relief planes leaving nightly from the island of Sao Tome withstood  
Nigerian anti-aircraft fire to provide an “air bridge” to landlocked 
Biafra. After leaving Church World Service in 1977, he held  
executive positions at the Tolstoy Foundation and at the International
Human Assistance Program (IHAP).

From 1980 until 1987, he served as Chief of Mission in Bonn,  
Germany for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as 
Germany, prior to re-unification, struggled with an influx of
refugees from eastern Europe and what was then East Germany
for which he was decorated by the German Government
with the Bundesverdienstkreuz. In 1988, he led a successful effort to  
open an IOM Mission to the Netherlands, gaining recognition of the  
Dutch government in part by drawing on University friendships and
family ties and served as its first Chief of Mission.  He then returned
to IOM headquarters in New York from which he retired in 1992.
Survivors include his wife of 58 years, the former Eleanor Colson Curtis
of Mount Vernon, NY; two sons, David J. van Hoogstraten of Washington, DC
and Nicholas van Hoogstraten of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY;
and four grandchildren.