The Woman Who Wanted to Help the St. Lazarus Children

Bernice Gottlieb, a prominent early advocate of international adoption, has died aged 95. She helped children from South Korea’s St. Lazarus community find adoptive families in the United States, while insisting that they stay in contact with their Korean parents, an unusual approach at the time.

St. Lazarus housed about 400 people affected by leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, and their families, who faced poverty and social exclusion despite the disease being treatable and not highly contagious. The children, called Migam-a, were not themselves ill but were stigmatised because their parents had the disease. Gottlieb had adopted a daughter from South Korea in 1969 and became a resource for prospective adoptive parents; her own childhood experience of being temporarily raised by another family informed her insistence on preserving family ties.