In 1908, Los Angeles was a city transformed by immigration. Among the newcomers were Jewish families fleeing persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe. When parents died or could no longer care for their children, there were few places for those children to go.
Siegfried Marshutz, a Los Angeles businessman and community leader, posed a simple question: “What, then, becomes of these little ones?”
The answer became the Jewish Orphans’ Home of Southern California, the organization we know today as Vista Del Mar.
From its beginning, Vista responded as the needs of children changed. It provided not simply food and shelter, but education, medical care and preparation for independent lives. As ideas about child welfare evolved, Vista evolved with them.
Then history brought new groups of children to Vista’s doors.
Beginning in 1935, children fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe began arriving at Vista. Among those who eventually found a home there was Willy Zwirn, who had survived the war hidden by French families who risked their lives to protect Jewish children from deportation. At Vista, he remembered, children formed friendships “that in many ways were closer than family.”
More than three decades later, history repeated itself. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Jewish families fearing for their children’s safety sent them to the United States. Vista was initially asked to find emergency homes for six children. By September, 79 Iranian children had either been placed or were awaiting placement.
And in 2022, another generation of children far from home needed a safe place to stay.
Working with the federal Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, Vista established Vista Haven to provide temporary shelter and services for unaccompanied migrant children while working toward their safe reunification with family members or other appropriate sponsors.
Meanwhile, Vista recognized another growing need among young people closer to home: adolescents struggling simultaneously with mental illness and substance use disorder. Building upon its long experience in behavioral health and residential care, Vista expanded its substance use disorder services and created the first Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility in the Los Angeles area specifically designed to treat youth with these co-occurring conditions.
The challenges facing children today are different from those of 1908, 1945 or 1979. But the question that inspired Vista’s founders has never really gone away.
What becomes of these little ones?
For more than a century, each generation at Vista has found its own answer.
The needs change. Vista changes with them.
The commitment endures.
