Dar El Tifl orphanage

Dar El Tifl orphanage is in East Jerusalem. It was started by Hind Husseini, a Palestinian woman who saved 55 orphaned survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre after they'd been trucked to Jerusalem and left to fend for themselves. She converted her grandfather's mansion into an orphanage to house them and it later became a school providing education to the orphans and to other Palestinian children.

Foundation

In April 1948, near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem Ms Husseini came across a group of 55 children, survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre where Zionists had killed their families and torn down their homes. In her words:

I was walking along the streets of the Old City when I came upon a group of the most wretched children. They had been carried from their homes, snatched from the protecting arms of their parents, and thrown into the streets of the Old City. They stood huddled together against the lofty walls of the Holy City, casting terrified looks toward Heaven as if supplicating and praying for an end to that horrible nightmare. Those innocent puzzled eyes glittering with tears made everyone wonder how such outrages could be committed against humanity in an age of enlightenment and knowledge.

Ms Husseini was able to provide the children with shelter in two rooms she rented nearby for her charity, the Social Work Endeavour Society. The head of the Notre Dame de Sion (also known as Sahyoun) convent on the Via Dolorosa was concerned for her safety travelling to visit them and arranged to take in the children, the rooms themselves being bombed shortly afterwards, 10 days or 2 weeks after the massacre.

After the ceasefire in Jerusalem, the children were relocated from the convent to Ms Husseini's birthplace, a mansion built by her grandfather in 1891. She transformed the house into an orphanage providing shelter to children survivors. Al-Husseini raised money, receiving funds from across the world. The orphanage grew and orphans from different villages and cities received their schooling at the orphanage including two Jewish girls who were not accepted at other schools. The house was re-named Dar al-Tifl al-Arabi (Arab Children's House).

After 1967

After the conquest of East Jerusalem by Israel in 1967, the school became largely girl-only. 300 orphans were still there in 1995 but half of these were from Gaza, where they were forced to return. In 2009, the Follow the Women prize was awarded to Mahira El-Dajani and it was stated that there were 250 orphans living at the house along with 1450 day students receiving instruction from pre-school to graduate level studies. In mid-2008 the UNRWA stated that the number of orphans had dropped to 35 of 2,000 students.

The orphanage was Hind Husseini’s (1916-1994) life-time work. She was twice recognised in Jordan in her later years, and she received the First Degree Medallion in Germany in 1989, 5 years before her death. She was involved in women's issues, established a college for women, and served in the Arab Women's Union.

Settler attention

Dar El Tifl is situated across the road from the offices of the Palestine National Authority and has become a target for settler invasions and attacks. Yigal Amir, later to be the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was an early organizer of demonstrations against the PNA and the orphanage became a target as well. Mahira Dajani, a life-long educator and newly the head of the Dar El Tifl's Board of Trustees (and still there in 2009), wrote this description in a letter to friends of the institution:

The scholastic year 1995/1996 was the worst year in the history of Dar El Tifl. We have tried to teach our children the love of peace and to train them to accept peaceful co-existence as a reality and to forget the evils of war. The presence of settlers outside the school gate changed the children's outlook on life as a whole. The settlers harassed the children in many ways, including: uttering filthy words and making lewd gestures, throwing rotten fruit and empty bottles at the school gate and inside the school grounds, trespassing onto the school grounds repeatedly so that the school has been forced to erect a wire fence over the wall. The cost of the fence was NIS 5,000 ($1,700), money which could have been spent on the children's needs. Additional harassment [included] ... prevention of anyone entering or leaving the premises [and] the arrest and interrogation of the school president.... [Orphans] were chased and threatened by settlers, and the school nurse and warden were threatened with death.

Film biopic

The 2010 film Miral (WP link) covers part of the history of the orphanage and Hind herself (played by Hiam Abbass). Her life and work is portrayed largely through the perspective of the titular orphan, Miral (Freida Pinto) who, in 1978, at the age of 5, went to the Institute following her mother's death. She knows little of the troubles until 1988 when, at the age of 15, she becomes a teacher at a refugee camp and falls in love with a militant.

A Palestinian orphan who "spent years of my adolescence in the early 80s" but later reached the US was badly disappointed:

... I knew that Israel and its various American lobbying wings had protested the showing of this film at the UN, claiming it to be anti-Israel. That gave me even more hope that I was about to watch the first honest portrayal of life as a Palestinian growing up under Israeli military occupation. By the time the film was over, however, the only reason I could fathom for such protestations was that Miral is perhaps the first semi-mainstream film to show Palestinians as something more akin to human rather than monsters to be reviled or pathetic and destitute refugees to be pitied. Indeed, Miral succeeds in showing a human face to Palestinians. Pittance and basic as that might be – to be recognized as fully human, even if only in a film – it is perhaps a feat after six decades of little more than the damaging and painful stereotypes.

... Someone with no background on the realities of this wretched conflict will walk away from Miral with the sense that it’s a dispute between two essentially equal sides who simply don’t see eye to eye. There was no real hint of the gross imbalance of power or the racially motivated destruction of life that inches deeper and deeper every day into what little remains of Palestine to Palestinians. No hint of the apartheid system employed as a means of slow ethnic cleansing. Even when it came to the bloody orphans of Deir Yassin, we are told that “soldiers” killed their parents. Anyone with knowledge of history or the social circumstances of the time would have known that the residents of that village would have likely been screaming warnings to others to run because “the Jews are here”. The word “soldier” then referred to the British and I can’t help but believe that the use of that word was meant to tiptoe around the fact that terrorist Jewish gangs butchered civilians in home after home in that village. At one point we see the British flag lowered and the Israeli flag raised, perpetuating the idea that Palestine was never there. These are just some examples of a fundamental dishonesty that underpins Miral.

...Moviegoers watching what little is shown of this reality will likely judge Israeli actions as justified, however distasteful. In other words, the minimally negative light in which Israel is shown is contextualized. Not so for Palestinians. Take for example Schnabel’s treatment of what could have happened to Israelis in a movie theatre when Fatima leaves a bomb under the seat [it never goes off, btw]. We see their innocent faces, one by one. They’re just like us, ordinary people just going to see a film. We see an unsuspecting couple making out, kissing in their seats. It’s not an emotional scene at all. But it does set the stage to give soldiers justification later on to beat Miral. The actions of the Israeli soldiers thus have context. On the other hand, Fatima seemingly decided to blow up a theatre full of people because she lost her job.

On April 4, 2011, days after the film's US release, Juliano Merr-Khamis, the Israeli actor and peace activist who plays Seikh Saabah in the film was shot to death at close range in his car by a a masked gunman outside the "Freedom Theater" he had established in the Jenin refugee camp.

Wikipedia shortcomings

Hind al-Husseini gets an article at Wikipedia and some of this article is based on what's there. Her most enduring legacy, the orphanage has not had an article of it's own. The TalkPage here contains examples of the hatred often freely expressed by editors even towards humanitarians.