Marlene Trestman

Most Fortunate Unfortunates 

Wednesday, November 15th at 1pm

The J - Mirowitz Performing Arts Center 

Marlene Trestman’s Most Fortunate Unfortunates is the first comprehensive history of the Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans. Founded in 1855 in the aftermath of a yellow fever epidemic, the Home was the first purposebuilt Jewish orphanage in the nation. It reflected the city’s affinity for religiously operated orphanages and the growing prosperity of its Jewish community. In 1904, the orphanage opened the Isidore Newman School, a coed, nonsectarian school that also admitted children, regardless of religion, whose parents paid tuition. By the time the Jewish Orphans’ Home closed in 1946, it had sheltered more than sixteen hundred parentless
children and two dozen widows from New Orleans and other areas of Louisiana and the mid-South.

General Admission: $30