Moshe's Children

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

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.