Freda, “Junior,” Beatrice, and Joe Hyde

“My mother was dying of cancer, and my father went off somewhere and they didn’t even know where he was. Left us in a house in San Antonio, Texas. We happened to have wealthy relatives, the Bennetts. And the Bennetts did not want to take care of seven children. So they contacted the Jewish Children’s Home in New Orleans and put us into it, four of us. The other three went with my father to New York but never saw him. He left them there.

I was five years old. I remember crying for a week because we were in isolation and I was scared to death. ‘We’ were Bea, Junior, Joe, and myself. Four children in isolation. Then we were put in with the other children and it was wonderful.”

Excerpt of Freda Hyde Lowenthal’s recollections in Howard Simons, Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1988), 172-175.

Bea, the oldest Hyde sibling, who lived in the Home for ten years, was discharged in 1935 into the care of the San Antonio Federation. “But,” as noted in the Home’s registry, “[she was] sent to Mr. and Mrs. L. Bennett, uncle and aunt, who live in London, England. The Home took care of sending her to London. The uncle arranged and paid for her transportation.”