International adoption pioneerBernice Gottlieb

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Born Bernice Friedman and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she married architect Ferdinand “Fred” Gottleib a few years after graduating from high school; he became quite successful, and they had two sons. In 1968, Bernice decided she wanted to adopt a child — from South Korea. At the time, there weren’t special adoption agencies for that purpose; it was a difficult and time-consuming process, but in 1969, the Gottliebs successfully brought home a 2-year-old orphaned daughter, who they named Susannah.

Gottlieb became the go-to expert for Americans wanting to do international adoptions. In 1972 she was approached by a Roman Catholic priest, Lee Kyong-Jai (aka “Alexander Lee”), who had come to New York from South Korea. She asked if he knew of any orphans that might be available for adoption. No, he said, not orphans, but rather children “stuck” in “leper colonies” with their parents. He himself ran St. Lazarus, south of Seoul: people with Hansen’s disease were isolated there due to the stigma of having the disfiguring disease; they were called “mundungi”.

Their children, completely healthy, were similarly stigmatized; their futures looked bleak. Fr. Lee and Mrs. Gottlieb started “Operation Outreach” to help get at least some of the children out. That required special legislation in the U.S. because the kids were not orphans, so Gottlieb got to work on that, getting bills passed, and eight children were rescued — four pairs of siblings to each of four American homes. “We’re starting with eight so that we can see what pitfalls we run into, if any,” Gottlieb said. “I don’t expect any.” Still, she had to work 12-14 hours per day just to get that many out, and the pieces didn’t fully fall together until April 1974, yet it still took two more years to get the kids out due to delays in getting the necessary federal legislation passed. “It’s so intense that I saw nothing else but the goal of getting those children here,” she said years later. “Had I failed, I think I would have set the leprosy cause in Korea back 50 years.”

The New York Times told the story on Page 1, saying the program was “believed to be unprecedented in the world history of adoption.” Gottlieb told the story in a 2010 book *, Take My Children: A Love Story — the main title after the repeated heartbreaking plea from parents hoping to get their children out of the colonies so they could have a chance at a decent life. “The longer it takes, the harder it gets,” said one father, who gratefully gave up his two oldest daughters, 3 and 5 years old. “The future for them here is bleak. They must go. Me and my wife would like our misery to end with this generation.” At the time, there were an estimated 80,000 Koreans with Hansen’s disease in such colonies. The Times said 100 American families were ready to adopt their children — but Korean colonists were anxious to give up 200 of their children. Such children were not at any particular risk of getting the disease in any case: only 5 percent of humans are susceptible to it, and only after prolonged and “intimate” contact. Still, the stigma was strong, hence the “leper colonies.”

Operation Outreach kept going, saving more children, expanding to other countries. The “International Year of the Child” was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979. Gottlieb wrote a research paper, “The Fact of Stigma”, and presented it to the U.N. She retired from the adoption field in the early 1980s, opening a successful residential real estate brokerage, selling it after about 20 years. In 1998, she was the recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor for her advocacy. Her Korean-born daughter, Dr. Susannah Gottlieb, is now a Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, teaching 20th Century literature and thought. Bernice Gottlieb died on August 25. She was 95.