The Zion Blumenthal Orphanage’s initial home was one of the most imposing structures in all of Jerusalem
Jerusalem’s orphan population grew dramatically in the 19th and early 20th centuries, due to a tragic convergence of factors. Dire poverty, lack of hygienic conditions, and poor health care infrastructure all led to a high death rate from malnutrition and disease in the Old Yishuv. There were also many children whose parents were alive but unable or unwilling to raise their children due to their circumstances.
Christian missionaries targeted these poor and vulnerable elements of the population in the waning years of Ottoman control of Jerusalem. To spread their faith, they founded a handful of orphanages, the most famous of which was the Schneller Orphanage established in 1860 by German Protestants in today’s Geula neighborhood (then a desolate area outside the Old City walls). The pernicious effects on young Jewish orphans of growing up in a Christian environment were bad enough, but these orphanages actually baptized the orphans.
Shortly after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1877, the great rabbi of Brisk, Rav Yehoshua Leib Diskin, decided to do something about this catastrophic situation. He and his wife began by simply hosting Jewish orphans in their home in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. When the number of orphans he took in made this temporary solution untenable, he rented space nearby that became the first official residence of the Diskin Orphanage.
The goal of the orphanage was to provide a home environment and a religious upbringing, to ensure that these children wouldn’t fall into the hands of the missionaries. Orphans and children abandoned by parents showed up and were well taken care of by Rav Yehoshua Leib Diskin’s capable staff. He shepherded the orphanage until he passed away in 1898, when leadership went to his son Rav Yitzchak Yerucham Diskin, who ran it until his own passing in 1925.
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