Abraheem Khayrallah Abu Azar — orphan intake statement, NER Sidon orphanage

Item Detail

Account of Abraheem Khayrallah Abu Azar’s family and how they were orphaned before admission to the Near East Relief orphanage at Sidon; recorded in English by Silas Hertzler, NER Director of Orphanages, Sidon district, 1919–1920.

"In beginning of the war, both father and mother took smallpox. Mother died, but father got well and was then drafted into the Turkish Army. The boy was then taken into the Orphanage at Sidon. One time during the war, the father came to the Orphanage to see his son, begged food and a little money. He has never been seen since that time."

Context

In 1919, Silas Hertzler, Director of Orphanages for Near East Relief in the Sidon district of present-day Lebanon, recorded short statements from the children admitted to the NER orphanage at Sidon. Each child described, in Hertzler’s English transcription, the family they had lost and how they came to the orphanage. Their accounts are of the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon — the wartime starvation, compounded by smallpox and typhus, that killed roughly 200,000 people in the region, most of them local Christians — and of fathers conscripted into the Ottoman army and never seen again.

These are not accounts of the Armenian, Greek, or Assyrian genocides; the children of Sidon were largely local Arab Christian famine and war orphans, and the orphanage that sheltered them later also took in Armenian children. The statements are among the few first-person intake records from NER’s Lebanon operations, and they document a population — the famine orphans of Greater Syria — often overshadowed by the genocide narrative that dominates the relief record.