Moshe's Children

The Orphans of the Holocaust and the Birth of Israel

Sergio Luzzatto author Stash Luczkiw translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:6th Jun '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Moshe's Children cover

Moshe's Children presents the inspiring story of Moshe Zeiri, a Jewish carpenter responsible for rescuing hundreds of Jewish refugee children who had survived the Final Solution. During the liberation of Italy, Zeiri, a volunteer in the British Army in Italy, assumed responsibility for and vowed to help around seven hundred Polish, Hungarian, Russian, and Romanian children. Although these orphans of the Shoah had been deprived of a family, a home, and a language and were irreparably robbed of their past, they were able to rebuild their lives through Zeiri's efforts as he founded the largest Jewish orphanage in postwar Europe in Selvino, Italy, where he began to rehabilitate the orphans and to teach them how to become citizens of the new nation of Israel.

Moshe's Children also explores Zeiri's own story from birth in a shtetl to his upbringing and Zionist education, his journey to the Land of Israel, and his work there before the war.

With narrative verve and scholarly acumen, Sergio Luzzatto brilliantly tells the gripping stories of these orphans of the Holocaust and the good man who helped point them to a real future.

"Sergio Luzzatto has unearthed a moving story and is telling it masterfully: how after 1945 some 700 young children who survived the Holocaust found refuge in northern Italy and ultimately emigrated to Israel. It is a dramatic story, beautifully and importantly told!"—Alon Confino, author of A World Without Jews

"Moshe's Children is a charming work. Written by an Italian scholar and now wonderfully translated into English, it tells the story of a children's house established by a a Polish volunteer in the British Army in Italy that served to offer a haven to orphans of the Holocaust, to rehabilitate them and prepare them for a life in Palestine, which after 1948 became Israel. Moshe's Children presents Zionism in a manner virtually unseen today, as the hope for the transformation of the Jewish people and the role that Zionism played in the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors."—Michael Berenbaum, American Jewish University

ISBN: 9780253065872

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

400 pages