Collections
Harpoot industries clothe 4,500 orphans. NER Weekly, 21 Jan 1921.
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1921
Item Detail
Louis Foley explains the three things the Harpoot industrial department was meant to do, which were to pay destitute families for work, to supply the station, and to teach older orphans a trade. Women washed, combed and spun wool, and the shoe factory employed 120 orphan boys between fifteen and eighteen alongside fifteen paid employees and a local foreman. Every garment worn by the station's 4,500 children came out of the program, and a night school for the working children was compulsory. J. E. Van Toor counted 1,604 industrial workers at Adana and Tarsus and 4,700 people on village relief.
Context
The Near East Relief Weekly Bulletin was a four-page weekly printed in Constantinople for the organization's own staff. It continued The Acorne, the bulletin of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, and took the new title with Vol. II, No. 42 on 23 October 1920, when the organization itself was renamed Near East Relief.
Because it was written for people already in the field and not for donors at home, the Weekly is plainer than anything Near East Relief printed in America. Station reports give the numbers (e.g., children fed, beds occupied, pairs of shoes made, tons landed at Batoum) and the personnel notes record who arrived, who transferred, who married and who died.
The run covers the fall of Kars, the landing of Russian refugees in Constantinople in the winter of 1920, the famine in Armenia through 1921 and 1922, and the French withdrawal from Cilicia.
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Holding Institution
Columbia University Library
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External Link
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Attribution
Digitized by Columbia University Libraries; available through HathiTrust (Public Domain).
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Rights
No known copyright restrictions. Based on available information, NERHS is not aware of copyright restrictions on this material. Items are presented for non-commercial research and educational use. Users are responsible for determining rights status and compliance with applicable law. If you believe you hold rights in this material or have information about rights holders not currently reflected, please contact [email protected].
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Notes
Masthead: 'Near East Relief. Vol. III. No. 3. 25 Rue Taxim, Pera, Constantinople. January 21, 1921.'
Most of the people described in these pages were survivors of the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and of the killing and deportation of Greeks and Assyrians in the same years. The bulletin does not use the word "Genocide," which was not coined until 1944. Its writers say "the deportations", "the massacres", or simply "the troubles", and often say nothing at all about how a child came to be an orphan. Where an issue documents the events or their aftermath, the record indicates this in the Subject field. The period's own vocabulary is kept in the original article titles and in quoted phrases.
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Document Contents
Louis Foley explains three aims of the Harpoot industrial department: paid work for destitute families, production for the station and trade instruction for older orphans; women spin, knit and weave, while 120 orphan boys work in the shoe factory and other shops repair buildings, machines and vehicles; every garment worn by the station's 4,500 children is made through the program; J. E. Van Toor reports 1,604 industrial workers at Adana and Tarsus, 455 Adana orphans, 80 Tarsus boys and 4,700 recipients of village relief; Mrs. Marden serves dinner to forty Psamatia children; letters from Marash describe school meals and clothing relief; Melville Chater traces the reuse of gasoline cans and a Sivas machine shop; personnel notes record departures and assignments.