Bonds Forged in Adversity Strong as Steel Decades Later

Some of them were children of what we’d now call “deadbeat dads.” Others came from families shattered by a parent’s death or the desperation of the Great Depression.

Collectively, the pain these seventy- and eightysomethings experienced as children was staggering. But in a West Los Angeles banquet room Sunday, many decades later, they mostly didn’t talk about those things.

A petite woman with a blond bouffant hairdo sighed as she remembered her parents’ separation and then divorce, events that landed her and her big sister in an orphanage. “But I’m here,” she said softly with a smile, decades and a continent away from those days. “That’s the important thing.”

Welcome to the when-life-hands-you-lemons-make-lemonade club.

The 100 or so former “inmates” of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York were gathered for their fourth annual West Coast reunion. There were certainly a few tears; age and infirmity are starting to thin their ranks. But mostly there was laughter--and a lot of really bad jokes.

“Joe Sarfaty here was the second most handsome boy in the orphanage,” mused a deadpan Ted Kaplan, 78, who came from Boca Raton, Fla., to emcee the entertainment and needle his 77-year-old pal from Encino. “Looking at him now, I just don’t know what happened.”

Then there was this comment: “I’m your best friend and I hate you,” a staple from my father-in-law, Jack Rubenson of Carson, who was orphaned at age 2 along with his identical twin, Sam. The brothers, both retired after sales careers, lived at the orphanage until they were 18. Now 84, they are still a curiosity as “the twins”; their cheeks got pinched plenty Sunday.

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The Manhattan asylum, funded by New York’s Hebrew Benevolent Society, operated from 1860 until 1941, when foster homes replaced institutional care as the model for kids in need. Columnist Art Buchwald is probably the orphanage’s most famous alum, and many of its former residents went on to happy and productive lives. Before welfare or group homes or organized foster care, more than 35,000 children found refuge at the H, as the kids called it. For many, the only alternative was the streets.

By the 1910s, the Jewish community’s donations had made the H into the best-endowed orphanage in America, according to Hyman Bogen, former resident and author of “The Luckiest Orphans,” a history of the place. Bogen wrote that, in 1911, the orphanage also became the first institution of its kind to provide psychological counseling. Even during the Depression, the former residents said, they had it pretty good: three squares a day, new clothes, movies on Saturday night and even sleep-away camp for a few golden weeks in the summer.

“Actually, we were ill-prepared for life,” recalled Rubenson. “Everything was provided for us. You had a tear in your shirt, they gave you a new one.”

Sarfaty, a retired lawyer, says the H “taught us self-respect and discipline.” He also recalls Rubenson dunking him in the lake at camp one summer. “You rascal. You were a counselor,” he chided Rubenson. “You should have known better.”

By 1916 the H, at Amsterdam Avenue and 136th Street, was bursting at the seams, housing a record 1,329 boys and girls. They were mostly children of immigrants, part of a turn-of-the-century tidal wave from Eastern Europe for whom the American dream hadn’t happened yet. In 1940, shortly before it closed, the orphanage took in German Jewish children. Most would never again see parents left behind in Germany. But many of the American kids were not actually orphans; they washed up at the H’s heavy oak doors after a parent’s illness, death or desertion.

Anne Nagler Olafson, who lives in the San Fernando Valley, was one of those. She and her two sisters landed at the H in 1931. Their father died when Olafson, now 79, was 4 years old and their mother worked cleaning houses until she had a nervous breakdown and gave up the girls.

“The love of parents is what we missed most,” recalled Olafson. Another woman remembered, “I cried for my mother every day. They couldn’t get me to stop.”

Friends helped fill the void. Martha Goldstein Alpert, 79, traveled to the reunion from Suffern, N.Y., to see Olafson, “my best friend,” and to sit with the other “girls” from the H. “All my friends are here,” she said. “I have very pleasant memories.”

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From the outside, the place hardly seemed the stuff of fond remembrances. The orphanage’s uptown building, the last of its three locations, was a three-story brick and stone affair that opened in 1884, a maze of dormitories, infirmaries and other facilities. Bogen described the building as “palatial,” but by the early 20th century, child welfare advocates had grown convinced that the children would be far better off in smaller settings.

Foster homes became the model for children who could no longer stay with their own parents and remain so to this day. Now called residential treatment facilities, some children’s asylums remain, like Vista del Mar in West Los Angeles or Hollygrove House in Hollywood, but they often focus on special-needs youngsters.

The H’s reunions--the East Coast alumni have met in Florida every January for the past 20 years--have the feel of a family confab where there’s nothing like a good tale retold. Take away the canes, the pinky rings, the thick glasses, the azure polyester pants, and aging men become boys again, still crowing over 60-year-old pranks. Like ditching mandatory Hebrew class by climbing out the fire escape, or snatching hot rolls off the trays the baker set to cool.

The women catch up on news about children and grandchildren.

“Can I brag about my daughters?” Olafson asked, beaming. One’s a doctor and one’s a lawyer.

Mostly though, these folks were just delighted to be together again for a few hours. “It all could have been worse,” shrugged one fellow.

Indeed.