Abstract
The development of child welfare systems in the Yishuv (lit. settlement; communities of Jewish residents of Palestine) is an overlooked, yet foundational part of the story of the Jews in Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. The thought, flexibility, and responsiveness put into the rescue, care, education, and training of thousands of Jewish children before the rise of Nazi Germany—and then tens of thousands of children thereafter—was the basis of not only those child welfare systems but also of social services in the future State of Israel. While much of Jewish and Zionist leadership focused on diplomatic, political, and military wins, social workers, teachers, and nurses were raising the children of the newly declared Jewish national home under British colonial rule in Palestine and thus the Jewish national home itself. This dissertation reveals how the health, well-being, and success of Palestine’s Jewish children reflected the health and success of the Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine and increasing aspirations for statehood, wherein the survival of each Jewish child represented the literal and symbolic survival of the Jewish people. To save one child became synecdochally integral to saving a whole nation. Moreover, the child-saving project took on such importance through its integration and entanglement with the existential crises of the day: the Zionist movement to settle Jews in the Holy Land; the efforts to rescue Jewish war orphans from antisemitic violence plaguing Europe and the Russian Empire; the flight of Jewish children and families from North African and Western Asian communities from poverty and oppression; and the influx of disadvantaged and orphaned Jewish children who lost their father or both parents to the effects of war—violence, poverty, and disease—in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By seeking to understand the practical expressions of ideals, values, and norms in the social constructions of the child, childhood, and orphanhood, this study reveals the distinctive ways in which the case of Jewish Palestine bucked the trends of the time and challenged fundamental, accepted views of the “best” way to raise children under institutional care.