The Woman Who Wanted to Help the St. Lazarus Children

Obituaries|The Woman Who Wanted to Help the St. Lazarus Children

When Bernice Gottlieb arrived at a village in South Korea, Mi Yun Lee, who was 9 years old, had never seen anyone like her. Gottlieb was tall and exuded an Audrey Hepburn glamour — a scarf carefully tied around her glossy black hair, high cheekbones, large, welcoming eyes. To Mi Yun, she was an angel who had descended from the sky, holding promises of a new future.

It was March 1974, and Gottlieb had flown from the United States with her husband to visit St. Lazarus, a community for people with leprosy, as Hansen’s disease was known then. About 400 people lived in the village’s dormitories and one-room homes. There was a medical clinic (a doctor only came once a month), a church, a school.

Though it was about 15 miles from Seoul, St. Lazarus was sequestered from mainstream Korean life, its residents shunned by families and society. By the 1970s, doctors knew that the disease was not highly contagious and was treatable, especially if caught early. Still, the stigma persisted. Outside small-scale farming, jobs were limited for people in the village. Poverty was the norm. So was community, family, love.

Gottlieb learned about St. Lazarus a few years earlier at a friend’s house in Westchester County, N.Y., when the Rev. Lee Kyong-Jai, the head of the Catholic village, came to raise money and awareness for his community. He told Gottlieb he needed families in the United States to adopt children, none of whom had the disease, but who faced stigma, nonetheless. They were known in South Korea as Migam-a, children of the infected. Most were unable to attend public schools (those who did hid the fact of their parents’ disease and couldn’t invite friends to their homes).

By the time Gottlieb met Father Lee, she knew plenty about international adoption and was a leader in the burgeoning movement. She and her husband, the architect Ferdinand Gottlieb, adopted their daughter, Susannah, from South Korea in 1969. They were the first Americans that the orphanage director had allowed to adopt.