In addition to serving two terms in Congress before retiring, Tenzer was a renowned champion for the Orthodox community
One of 20th-century American Orthodoxy’s finest representatives was Herbert Tenzer (1905–1993). Born into a family of Polish immigrants on the Lower East Side, he graduated NYU Law School in 1927 and rose through the ranks of corporate law. As a senior partner in the firm of Tenzer, Greenblatt, Fallon, and Kaplan, he was known for his legal prowess, ethics, and his willingness to assist the less fortunate.
Tenzer founded and ran countless Jewish institutions and organizations, but none more important than Rescue Children Inc., which he founded in the immediate aftermath of World War II in partnership with the Vaad Hatzalah. Rescue Children Inc. set up orphanages to house, rehabilitate, and educate child survivors of the Holocaust under Orthodox auspices. Tenzer utilized government connections to obtain buildings free of charge in France and Belgium.
Before being placed in Rescue Children Inc. homes, children were interviewed by executive members of the organization, who paid their own expenses to Europe. The children would be asked for biographical information and for recollections of people in their hometowns. Rescue Children Inc. would then attempt to locate relatives of the children and ultimately succeeded in identifying families of over 400 children.
The agency developed an “adoption” program to encourage organizations and individuals to sponsor children, with a goal of raising $365 annually for each child, a dollar a day. Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York was the first to “adopt” an orphan this way — an eight-year-old Jewish boy from Belgium. In July 1947, O’Dwyer sent a bicycle to the boy at a dinner in honor of Herbert Tenzer at the Hotel Astor in New York.
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