Seven girls spinning wool in the barracks. Aleppo, c. 1919–1920.

Item Detail

Armenian refugees in Aleppo were sheltered in the former Turkish army barracks, as many as eight thousand at a time. The barracks held a hospital, an orphanage, soup kitchens, and wool and weaving works that employed the women. Christian L. Graber ran the industries from June 1919 and commanded the barracks from that July. Seven girls stand in a row below a stone stair, each holding the fiber up in both hands with the spindle hanging and turning below it, and several of their dresses are heavily patched. The barracks knitting rooms paid the women two and a half piasters a day.

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.