Collections
Near East Relief sets out its Syria program. September 1921.
Location
Beirut, Lebanon
Year
1921
Item Detail
This report describes the organization Nellie Miller joined in the month she arrived. Relief in Syria began informally in wartime under Mr. Dana of the American Press. A committee formed in New York, deliberately separate from the official Red Cross so that it could work inside the Ottoman Empire, took the funding on, and the American Red Cross commission under Major Nicol ran the Syrian work until the armies demobilized. The committee had already decided to close the soup kitchens and industrial work and gather the children into a few equipped orphanages where trades and farming could be taught, a year before the evacuations out of the interior filled them.
Context
Nellie Marie Miller Mann (1897–1997) was a member of Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Indiana, and a graduate of Goshen College. The Mennonite Relief Commission placed her with Near East Relief in 1921, one of two Mennonite women it sent to the Near East in these years. She was appointed on 20 August 1921, sailed the same day aboard the S.S. Patria, and reached Beirut on 20 September. At the Syria-Palestine headquarters she was secretary to the treasurer and, by April 1923, in charge of the individual remittance department. She left Beirut at the end of August 1923.
The collection holds her letters to her family and to her fiancé Cleo Mann, her appointment papers and contract, and the Near East Relief reports, rosters and field accounts she kept. Together they document the Beirut office through the movement of orphans out of Anatolia and Cilicia into Syria and Lebanon in 1922, the Greek deportations of the following winter, and the deaths of two NER workers, Menno Shellenberger at Diarbekir and Lester James Wright on the Aleppo road. David W. Mann published his mother's writings as Letters from Syria, 1921–1923 (2013) and gave the originals to the Near East Foundation.
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Holding Institution
Rockefeller Archive Center
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External Link
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Attribution
Rockefeller Archive Center. Near East Foundation records, FA406. Nellie Miller-Mann, Series 14.
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Rights
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Notes
Written in ink at the head of page 1: "Written in 1921 before the great exodus of orphans from Turkey."
Typed in the report: "the price of a rottle of wheat varied between 250 and 300 piasters Turkish ... the profiteering, which was going on at that time, demanded that generous people in America should pay between $7.00 and $9.00 in American money, in order to buy enough wheat in Syria to keep one person alive for less than a week." / "The Near East Relief is chartered by the American Government as an absolutely undenominational organisation. About nine tenths of the money comes from Protestants, but every effort is made to avoid propaganda and proselytising." / "The whole attempt is to make the child feel more like the member of a family, free, honorable and self-reliant, rather than like the pauper in an asylum, imprisoned, despised and a parasite."
Sources for the Item Detail:
• "A Flight of Children," The New Near East, November 1922, pp. 14–15 ("the stations at Harpoot, Marash, Urfa, Adana, Aintab, Diarbekir, Arabkir and Mardin have been reduced to medical and relief work among the refugees"). Nellie Miller-Mann, Series 14, Rockefeller Archive Center.
• Near East Relief, Syria-Palestine Area, Organization and Personnel, 28 April 1923, sheet II, for the same stations nineteen months later. Nellie Miller-Mann, Series 14, Rockefeller Archive Center.
About this group
• Nellie Miller-Mann, Series 14, Near East Foundation records (FA406), Rockefeller Archive Center.
• Near East Relief appointment certificate, 20 August 1921, signed C. V. Vickrey and C. M. Fowle ("Miss Nellie M. Miller has been duly appointed a member of the relief expedition"). Nellie Miller-Mann, Series 14, Rockefeller Archive Center.
• Near East Relief, Syria-Palestine Area, Organization and Personnel, 28 April 1923, sheet I ("Secretary to Treasurer & in charge of Individual Remittance Dept. — Miss Nellie M. Miller"). Nellie Miller-Mann, Series 14, Rockefeller Archive Center.
• Nellie Miller Mann, Letters from Syria, 1921–1923, transcribed and edited by David W. Mann (Morgantown, Pa.: Masthof Press, 2013).
• Rockefeller Archive Center finding aid, Near East Foundation records: https://dimes.rockarch.org/collections/Ahi2i3M7wcFTbQuXZgxDib
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Document Contents
Eleven-page typescript carbon titled "The Near East Relief in Syria," unsigned, with an ink note at the head reading that it was written in 1921 before the great exodus of orphans from Turkey. The carbon is weak and several passages are read with difficulty. It traces relief in Syria from the private wartime work of Mr. Dana, manager of the American Press, through a committee of eight Americans at Beirut and a separate committee formed in New York, the famine winter of 1918 to 1919, the arrival of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and the American Red Cross commission under Major Nicol, to Near East Relief under managing director Howard McAfee. It gives the Beirut committee by name, the four-point orphanage program, and the consolidation of stations on Mardin, Urfa, Marash, Jubeil, Ghazir and Sidon, with the Syria Mission's buildings at Miamia taken for ten years and land given rent free by Dr. George Ford. Page seven tabulates orphans by station for September 1921, under a heading describing the figures as approximate. Several entries on that page and the next are too faint to read with confidence and two rows do not add as typed, so the figures are not reproduced here. Further pages give the religious composition of the three main orphanages, average cost per child, the undenominational policy, and the training intended to leave each child self-supporting at seventeen. A pencil note at the foot of page eleven is illegible.