Silas Hertzler Photographs (1919–1920)

In 1919, Silas Hertzler took charge of three hundred Syrian and Armenian boys at the Sidon orphanage. Many had lost parents in the Armenian Genocide or the wartime famine in Mount Lebanon. He had come to the region with the first group sent by the Mennonite Relief Commission for War Sufferers. The group worked under the American Red Cross until 1 April 1919, when Near East Relief took over the Red Cross’s relief work in Syria. He served into 1920.

The album and loose prints in Hertzler’s papers cover relief work well beyond his own assignments. In Aleppo, the former Turkish army barracks accommodate Armenian refugees, and girls stand spinning wool. At Antioch, camels kneel under loads for the mountain villages. Photographs from Sidon show the orphanage bakery, boys gathered on the steps, and children waiting at a back door for clothing. Others show orphanages at Jerusalem and Konia.

At Antoura, Armenian and Kurdish children stand in lines across the orphanage courtyard. During the war, Ottoman authorities had given Armenian children Turkish names and punished them for speaking Armenian. The photograph dates from the period after American relief workers took over the institution.

Near East Relief later asked its field staff for photographs to use in fundraising appeals. Pictures of children waiting for clothing or entering an orphanage could show a donor the need, and later photographs could show what the money had provided. Beneath a group of boys at Nabatiyeh in March 1919, several bare from the waist up, one caption asks: “Do they need clothes?”

The collection opens with three portraits of Miriam Moosa, a girl from Lifta, near Jerusalem. The first shows her on arrival in torn clothing, with a shawl over her head. The second was taken, in the words of its caption, “immediately after being prepared to be received.” She is now in different clothes. In the third, taken six months later, she wears a patterned dress and apron. Her head is uncovered and her hair has grown out.

The originals are held in the Silas and Anna Weaver Hertzler Papers (HM1/197), Goshen College Archives, Goshen, Indiana.

Sources and provenance: Original photographs and captions from the Silas and Anna Weaver Hertzler Papers (HM1/197), Goshen College Archives, Goshen, Indiana. For Hertzler’s service and the Mennonite relief group, see Orie O. Miller, “Our Relief Work in the Near East and Russia,” in J. S. Hartzler, Mennonites in the World War, or Nonresistance Under Test (Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1922), ch. XIV. Additional historical sources are cited in the individual photograph records.