Zoom information will be sent out the week before the meeting to JGSMD members.

Marlene Trestman will discuss the resources she used in writing "Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans" (LSU Press, 2023), the first comprehensive history of the nation’s earliest purpose-built Jewish orphanage, and in sharing stories of some of the 1623 children and 24 widows who lived there between 1856 and 1946. Trestman will offer suggestions for pursuing information about former residents of America’s fifty other Jewish orphanages, specifically including Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum.

Orphaned at age 11, Marlene Trestman grew up in New Orleans as a foster care client of the Jewish Children’s Regional Service (JCRS), the social service agency that succeeded the Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans. Marlene is a former special assistant to the Maryland Attorney General, where she devoted her 30-year legal career. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate and former trustee of Goucher College, she earned her MBA from Loyola of Maryland where she later taught law. For her writing, she has received funding from the Supreme Court Historical Society, Hadassah Brandeis Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Jewish Archives, Texas Jewish Historical Society and Southern Jewish Historical Society. Marlene lives in Baltimore and enjoys frequent visits to New Orleans, where she is guest curating a special exhibit about the Home to open in 2025 at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience. Her first book, Fair Labor Lawyer (LSU Press, 2016), is the biography of trailblazing New Deal attorney and Supreme Court advocate Bessie Margolin, who grew up in the Home. Learn more about Marlene and her work at www.marlenetrestman.com.

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Upcoming Programs

News Tidbits

JGS Maryland has been reconstituted!
JGSMD had its initial meeting on Sunday August 18, 2013 to see if there was interest in the group's reconstituting. The turnout was overwhelming, with 31 people attending with only a few days' notice. Look forward to new programming over the next year!
Some of the attendees: