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Very interesting article. Seems I was a black market baby. I was adopted through the Hebrew Kindergarten and Infants Home in 1945. Full Article here This article would like to explore still another trial of the era that, like the Kefauver hearings, was haunted by the threat of gangsters and of moral corruption. In this case, the principal defendant was a thirty-eight year old Jewish New York attorney, Irwin Slater, who, in 1950, was accused of what was popularly known as “baby-selling” or “black market baby racketeering.” Indicted along with Slater were two Jewish colleagues: Harry Wolfson, a fellow attorney and friend, and Bess Bernard, a homemaker who had served for twelve years as executive director of the Hebrew Kindergarten and Infants Home in Queens. On December 4, 1949, the three became the first persons to be indicted under a New York State law mandating that only parents or legal guardians could “place out” babies for adoption. The charges against them included conspiracy, the illegal or “unauthorized” placement of children, and receiving compensation for such placements. By the end of the trial that took place six months later, Slater had been found guilty on two counts of illegal placements and on one count of receiving compensation. Bess Bernard was convicted on similar grounds, while Harry Wolfson (who worked on legal papers for Slater and never handled the babies who were “placed out”) was acquitted on all counts. What I have called the “iconic” nature of the trial, as well as the currents of antisemitism that swirled around it, stemmed, in great measure, from a particular dimension of Slater’s practice. That is, it was not only that he “bought” and “sold” babies; rather, it was that his practice consisted of placing babies who were almost always born of Christian (and usually Catholic) mothers with parents who were invariably Jewish. This practice met an acute need on the part of his Jewish clients: that is, while Catholic babies were relatively abundant, the extremely low number of Jewish babies born out-of-wedlock—the principal source of babies available for adoption—meant that there were never enough Jewish babies to meet the demand for them. As Ellen Herman notes in a history of adoption in the U.S.: “At mid-century, authorities conceded there were simply no Jewish children to adopt. One estimate had would-be Jewish adopters outnumbering available children by a ratio of twenty-five to one.”4 And historian Barbara Melosh observes that while prospective Jewish parents might try to find a child through Jewish social services, “their quest for children rarely ended there. As members of a minority community in the United States, with a very low rate of birth out of wedlock, Jews faced formidable obstacles to adoptive parenthood. Jews were the first group to experience the extreme imbalance that would come to characterize adoption more generally.”5
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