"His Star of Hope" — NER Christmas appeal, 1921

Context

Color appeal poster issued for the December 1921 Christmas season, built around an explicit nativity parallel: an emaciated Armenian child stands at right while the silhouettes of three Magi on camels cross a dark hillside at left, beneath an oversized star inscribed "N E R / Formed by 5,000 Children from one of the already overcrowded Orphanages." Body copy reads, "This child knocked at the door of a Near East Relief Orphanage in Erivan August 7th and was turned away because there was 'no room' / 1921 years ago another CHILD was turned away because there was no room."

The appeal dates the rejection at the Erivan (Yerevan) orphanage to August 7, 1921. By that summer, NER's facilities in Soviet Armenia were operating well above design capacity in the wake of Sovietization (December 1920) and the famine accompanying the post-war collapse of the South Caucasus. The poster's framing — Christ-child analogy on the right, Magi on the left, NER as a star — exemplifies the religious-iconographic register that ran through the organization's holiday-season appeals throughout the 1920s.