Children march in file across the orphanage yard. Zahle, 1922.

Location

Zahle, Lebanon

Year

1922

Item Detail

The orphanage in Zahle cared for about 100 children in buildings formerly used by the British School, under Shehadi Shehadi's management and Near East Relief's control. Shehadi gave up a lucrative business and the governorship of Tyre to care for the orphans. He inspected the orphanage daily, tasted the children's food, managed the finances, and planned the studies and industrial work.

Context

Bayard Dodge (1888–1972) taught at the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut, and was its president from 1923 to 1948. The son of Near East Relief's treasurer, he helped build the network of orphanages that received Armenian children moved south out of Anatolia, and in April 1921 he secured French assurances that 1,000 children from Marash and 700 from Urfa could enter Syria.

The album records that movement and its aftermath through 1921 and 1922: the refugee camp at Alexandretta, the convoys out of Marash, the sailing of 1,500 Harpout orphans to Constantinople in September 1922, and the orphanages at Aleppo, Antilyas, Jebail, Nahr Ibrahim, Sidon, Miamia, Ghazir and Shemlan. A December 1922 count puts some 10,740 children in the Beirut-area institutions. Most were survivors of the Armenian Genocide.

View in the Digital Archive

  • Holding Institution

    American University of Beirut Archives and Special Collections

  • Attribution

    Bayard Dodge Photograph Albums, Volume IV, American University of Beirut, Archives and Special Collections; digital surrogate by the Near East Foundation.

  • Rights

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  • Notes

    Album card: “Zahleh. / Orphans + buildings formerly used by British School.”

    "The Highest Orphanage in the World," Near East Relief [Newsletter], Vol. IV No. 13, 1 April 1922, pp. 1–2, gives Shehadi's full name and background: "Mr. Shehadi Shehadi, of Providence, R. I., an honorary member of the Class of 1892, Brown University, is in charge of this orphanage up among the clouds." He returned to his native town in 1914, one month before the declaration of war, and stayed. In 1915, "the locusts came to this region and ate up everything green — even the olive leaves," typhus followed, and Mr. Paul Erdman and Shehadi "worked among the people and gathered together the orphans of the neighborhood." To give men work, he spent relief funds paving the town's streets: "Today Zahleh streets are white and clean with the small even stones carried from the mountain quarry and placed by the men who had no work."

Children march in file across the orphanage yard. Zahle, 1922.