Miriam Moosa on the day she came in from Lifta. c. 1919–1920.

Item Detail

Children entering a Near East Relief orphanage first passed through a receiving station: deloused, bathed, their old clothes burned, issued clean ones, and held apart for ten days to prevent infection. Miriam Moosa came from Lifta, a village outside Jerusalem, and stands barefoot in torn strips of clothing with a shawl over her head. This is the first of three photographs of her, made on arrival, before any of that had happened.

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.