12 - An Adventure in Identity

Summary

My name is Ellen Rubinstein. I was left in the baby depository at the Patras Orphanage in March 1958. A note was attached to my body that read, “Her name is Despo. She was born 1/5/1958. She likes to eat.”

How did I find myself from that orphanage to the United States?

Gilbert and Carole Alexander were close friends of my parents. In 1957, Carole lost a daughter at the age of two to cancer. They did not want to risk another birth and decided to adopt. They knew there were many Greek orphans available, and the cost of adopting a “white” American child was too much money for a middle-class family to handle. Somehow, through a Jewish organization and a reference, contact was made with a woman named Rebecca Issachar, who could secure a child for adoption from Greece. Rebecca Issachar was the sister of a Greek-Jewish lawyer, who would guarantee an adoption from Greece at a reasonable price. Her brother Maurice Issachar, active and prominent in Athens, could handle the adoption process with the Greek courts and have the acquired baby flown to New York in just a couple of months of time. The Alexanders hired Rebecca and her brother. Three months later, a baby girl, whom they named Jayne, became part of the Alexander family. ( Jayne and I have remained friends and we have visited each other numerous times over the years.)

After desperately trying for ten years to conceive, my own mother decided to call her friend Carole Alexander to help her make contact with Rebecca Issachar to begin the process of adoption from Greece. Within months, by May 1958, I, too, was adopted with the assistance of Rebecca and her brother Maurice. He, along with several others, was charged with illegal adoption practices in the State of New York one year later. The charges were eventually dismissed because a legal loophole provided that adoption by proxy was considered lawful in the Greek courts.

To be exact, I arrived at LaGuardia airport from Greece on May 26, 1958. Waiting to greet me were my new Jewish family: my parents, both sets of grandparents, my uncle and my aunt.