These are Our Children (review)

Children represent the future of a community. The manner in which children are nurtured and educated tells something about how it views its past, present and future as well as reveals the power struggles and conflicts that take place over what and how children should be taught. In These are Our Children, Reena Sigman Friedman relates how Jewish communities in three cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland—provided for their neediest children. Drawing on records from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, the Jewish Foster Home of Philadelphia, and the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, Friedman traces the evolution of Jewish orphanages from 1880 to 1925. She places them within the larger context of Progressive Era child-saving, changes in pedagogical theories, and the Americanization of immigrant children.

Friedman’s use of three institutions gives this work a scope not shared by the two other recent works on Jewish orphanages, Hyman Bogen’s The Luckiest Orphans (1992) and Gary Edward Polster’s Inside Looking Out (1990), which accounts for the work’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. By drawing upon manuscript materials from three different institutions in addition to printed reports and histories of orphanages in other cities, Friedman has been able to construct a detailed picture of the trends in the care of indigent, abandoned, and orphaned Jewish children in America during this period. She is also able to identify aspects of each institution reflected local needs, or the idiosyncrasies of a particular director. For example, the chapter “In Their Own Image” chronicles the conflict between the “uptown,” usually Reform, orphanage directors and managers, and the “downtown,” predominantly Orthodox, Jewish communities they served. Because Friedman studied three institutions, the complex relationship between two groups emerges more clearly, with the orphanage administrators ultimately providing the leadership towards compromise or resistance.

Unfortunately, at times Friedman provides this detailed coverage at the expense of readability and attention to the personal experiences behind the institutional histories. The value, not to mention the sheer volume, of the information she conveys, partially offsets the fact that this is not an easy book to read. Comparisons among the three institutions are difficult to follow at times, particularly when quantitative. Tables might have presented this information in a more digestible form.

Perhaps the greater casualty involved the personal experiences of the children, which do not come through in Friedman’s narrative, despite excerpts from interviews with ten former residents. Certainly these reminiscences provide occasional windows into the lives of poor Jewish children, but their impact is dwarfed by that of the institutional records and official communiques of the adults who ran the orphanages.

Despite these weaknesses, These are Our Children provides a valuable resource for those interested in the Jewish experience in America during the Progressive Era, especially in the creation and operation of some of its most influential institutions, and in the tension between Reform and Orthodox communities. If this book is read in conjunction with The Luckiest Orphans, Inside Looking Out and Hebrew Orphan Society alumnus Art Buchwald’s recent autobiography Leaving Home, the reader will come away with both the inside and outside stories of American Jewish orphanages.