Spanning antebellum years through World War II, Marlene Trestman’s Most Fortunate Unfortunates is the first complete history of the nation’s earliest purpose-built Jewish orphanage, which was heralded as a “Magnificent Monument to Hebrew Benevolence.” With narrative empathy and scholarly rigor, Trestman gives readers insight not only into one specific orphanage, but into the larger challenges, triumphs, and dilemmas of an American Jewish community determined to care for its neediest children. Augmented by rare archival photos and more than 140 interviews and oral histories of alumni, administrators, and their descendants, this powerful institutional history of a pioneering Jewish orphanage comes to life with deeply personal accounts of childhood amid evolving standards of childcare.
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