Moshe's Children: The Orphans of the Holocaust and the Birth of Israel

Sergio Luzzatto

Jun 2023 · Indiana University Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Sergio Luzzatto is Professor and the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History at University of Connecticut. Three of his books on Italian history, The Body of Il Duce, Padre Pio, and Primo Levi's Resistance, have been translated into English.

Stash Luczkiw is a New York–born poet and translator based in Italy.