The Hebrew National Orphan Home: Memories of Orphanage Life (review)

The Hebrew National Orphan Home: Memories of Orphanage Life is an engaging collection that is true to its title. The book’s editors, Ira Greenberg, Richard Safran, and Sam George Arcus, grew up in New York’s Hebrew National Orphan Home (HNOH, “the Home,” or simply, “The H”) during the 1930s and early 1940s. The book paints a generally positive picture of childhood at the HNOH, although the authors are not blinded to the darker sides of institutional life. For these authors, this is a story of triumph over adversity. As Safran writes in the book’s prologue, “We not only survived, we flourished. We became tough and self-sufficient.... Tenderness,” writes Safran, “was something we rarely experienced and certainly never understood. What replaced love was a fierce devotion to one another, to our many championship teams, and to our hazy dreams of capturing a measure of success” (p. ix).

Greenberg et al.’s The Hebrew National Orphan Home is a well-edited memoir focusing on the experiences of a handful of the 1,300–1,800 boys who passed through the HNOH’s doors from 1914 to 1958. The book is also a social commentary on contemporary child welfare policy. Greenberg and his coauthors conclude that today’s disadvantaged children need both the “hard-charging Newts [Newt Gingrich] to organize and build . . . orphanages, and . . . the caring and intellectually gifted Hillaries [Hillary Rodham Clinton] to operate, supervise, and regulate those institutions . . .” (p. 286).¹

The book’s authors are certainly well-qualified to express their opinion on the topic. All are HNOH success stories. Ira Greenberg earned a B.A. in journalism from Oklahoma University, an M.A. in English from the University of Southern California, an M.S. in counseling from Los Angeles State University, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Claremont Graduate School. Richard Safran has a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in English from Hunter College. He also holds an Advanced Certificate in Educational Administration and Supervision and was a school principal. Sam George Arcus earned a B.S.S. from City College of New York and a M.S.W. from Columbia University. He held various positions in Jewish community centers located throughout the United States and was executive director of the Jewish community center in Tucson at the time of his retirement. Although none of these men are trained historians, the book includes a respectable bibliography and index.

The Hebrew National Orphan Home got its start on December 5, 1912 when a group of men and women from New York’s Lower East Side “raised $64 and committed themselves to creating an Orthodox Jewish home for destitute children” (p. 103). The founders purchased a four-story tenement building located at 57 East 7^th Street and accepted the institution’s first residents, the four Kassofsky brothers, on June 7, 1914. Within six months twenty boys lived at the home. By the HNOH’s third year, the organization housed over 100 boys and had expanded to a second building located on 8^th Street directly behind the original house. Supporters soon looked for a more country-like setting that could accommodate a larger facility. The HNOH reached its goal on July 26, 1920 when the organization moved seventeen miles north to a new red-brick building located on a twenty acre site at 407 Tuckahoe Road in Yonkers, New York. The HNOH operated at this location as a 130-bed residential facility for orphans, half-orphans, and abandoned Jewish boys until 1958. An estimated 1,300 to 1,800 boys spent at least part of their childhood at “The Home.” Younger boys attended elementary school at the HNOH, and older youths went to Yonkers’ Theodore Roosevelt High School.

As Greenberg and his coauthors show, throughout its history changing trends in child welfare policy directly affected...