The most important task, however, was to hide the thousands of widows and orphans who had taken refuge in Aleppo. Many were placed with families that were, as a rule, Christian and, often, Armenian. The adolescent girls and women frequently worked as domestics. But Aleppo was plagued by a severe food shortage, with the result that families could not keep these deportees in their homes for long, to say nothing of harassment from the authorities, who utilized all available means to obstruct humanitarian aid to the Armenians and bring the Americans’ praiseworthy efforts to naught.11 The deportees were haunted by their fear of the regular raids staged in the city by the authorities, who promptly dispatched those they managed to find to the Syrian desert - that is, to a swift death.
The massive spring 1916 influx into the Urfa region of Muslim refugees fleeing the Russian advance in the eastern provinces went some way, according to the U.S. consul, toward improving the situation of the Armenian deportees still living in Aleppo. As the Ottoman government was hard put to aid these Muslim war victims, Jackson proposed, in sum, to organize a food distribution program that would bypass the local administration. The success of this operation gave the U.S. consular services a wider margin of maneuver when it came to distributing food to the city’s Armenian deportees. At the same time, the American consul subsidized the German and Swiss charitable organizations that were attempting to aid Armenians and also allocated a monthly stipend to the Relief Committee created by Aleppo’s Armenian prelacy. Read all
AGBU in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq in the Post-War Period
Dr. Asadur Altunian (born in Sivas, 1857, died in Aleppo, 1950), who founded the Aleppo hospital for Armenian deportees, also helped found the city's Armenian orphanage (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
The Protestant minister Aharon Shirajian (1867-1939) of Marash, founder and supervisor of the Aleppo orphanage (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).