The letters below are from the Herbert Hoover Subject Collection of the Hoover Institution Archives. They were sent to Herbert Hoover by children of Bielsk and Siemiatycze during the interwar period. Hoover was appointed by then President Woodrow Wilson to head the American Relief Administration (ARA), a special organization that used $100 million appropriated by Congress after the end of World War I. The ARA became the major source of food for 300 million people in 21 countries in Europe and the Middle East. The ARA officially ended on June 30, 1919, but it was evident to Hoover that children would still suffer, so he devised the ARA European Children's Fund as a private charitable organization. It fed children through the summer of 1921. The European Children's Fund was supported by American donations and by sale of Food Draft Packets. This was the origin of CARE packages. Hoover would later become President in 1929. During his lifetime, Hoover helped supply food to 57 countries. An article in the Hoover Digest contains other images and a history of the letters
It appears that the letters are completely hand
drawn. Two of the letters are dated 1921. The other two are
undated. Each letter consists of two pages. The first page is the
letter itself. The second page is a list of signatures of children
in Bielsk. Their names have been transcribed at the bottom of the
page. The Yiddish names on the signature pages are numbered and
noted in the list of transcribed names. The letters were written
with many mistakes in syntax and used old Polish form. Please email the coordinator with
any suggested corrections or refinements to the translations.
The chapters listed below, in the Bielsk Podlaski
yizkor book, Bielsk-Podliask; Book in the Holy Memory of the
Bielsk Podliask Jews Whose Lives Were Taken During the
Holocaust Between 1939 and 1944, provide a history of the
Jewish children's kitchen and orphanage:
Special thanks to: Heather Wagner at the Hoover Institution Archives for providing the letters; Tomasz Wisniewski for translating the letters from Polish to English; Mindy Crystel Gross for providing the translations of the Yiddish names; and to Judy Baston for bringing the existence of these letters to my attention.
| Letter from The Children of the Second Jewish Kitchen in Bielsk, circa 1921. |  |
Letter from The Children of the Second Jewish Kitchen in Bielsk, dated 1921. |  |
| Letter from The Children of the Jewish Prevenotory (Orphanage?) no 4 in Bielsk, circa 1921. |  |
Letter from the Jewish children of Siemiatycze, province Bielsk, Grodno Land, Kitchen no. 4. Dated July 4, 1921. |  |
Updated March 30, 2025
Copyright © 2014 Andrew Blumberg
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