Nine Mennonite workers at the Galilee conference. October 1919.

Item Detail

Between them, the nine ran the Mardin and Diyarbakir stations, the Syrian Orphanage at Jerusalem, the Aleppo refugee camp, the Sidon district orphanages, and the Beirut motor transport. They sit on the shore under a eucalyptus at the conference at Magdala on 12 October 1919, in shirtsleeves and ties, one man higher on the slope behind the front row. Orie O. Miller became assistant director of the Syrian area, which ran from Port Said to Mardin and held at least 7,000 orphans. William Stoltzfus directed the Sidon district, where Hertzler was responsible for three hundred boys.

Context

Silas Hertzler (1888–1975) served in Syria from January 1919 to March 1920, first under the American Red Cross and, from 1 April 1919, under the American Committee for Relief in the Near East. He was one of seven young volunteers the Mennonite Relief Commission for War Sufferers sent on the relief ship Pensacola on 25 January 1919. After a few months in the Beirut transport department, he went to the Sidon district, where William Stoltzfus directed the work, and Hertzler was responsible for three hundred boys in the orphanage. Many of the children had been orphaned by the Armenian Genocide or by the wartime famine in Mount Lebanon. He taught at Goshen College from 1920 to 1958.

The collection draws on his loose prints and relief photograph album at Goshen College Archives. It records the Sidon orphanage and its trade shops, the Armenian refugee barracks at Aleppo, the Syrian Orphanage at Jerusalem, and the Antoura orphanage, where Ottoman authorities had tried to make Armenian children Turkish. Three portraits follow one girl, Miriam Moosa, from her arrival to six months later. Some prints show places he is not known to have worked, among them Konia and Smyrna.